The last of the 5-1/4 inch diskettes

I was doing some housecleaning last night and realized that I had a shelf full of 5-1/4 inch diskettes, but I haven’t had a computer in the house that could read them for about a year. So I tossed them out (I couldn’t think of any way to recycle them).

Out, 1981 taxes!

Out, PC-File!

Out, Word Perfect!

Out, TapCIS!

But I couldn’t bring myself to discard absolutely everything — when we ordered our original IBM PC in 1981 (we got such an early enough machine that it only had 64KB on the motherboard and one-sided diskette drives), we bought three pieces of software to go with it. MS-DOS 1.0, Microsoft Adventure, and VisiCalc. The first two programs are long gone, but I found the VisiCalc diskettes last night and decided to hang on to them for no good reason — after all, I have nothing which can read them! But maybe they’ll be collectables someday.

Offline till Tuesday

I get my Net connectivity through work — my home system is behind the firewall, right on the building LAN. It’s very convenient. But this weekend, Almaden is having its twice-yearly site powerdown and major maintenance — and so my connectivity will vanish when they flip the big switch.

I expect to cope just fine, and hope my silence doesn’t distress any of you.

Have a great weekend, and Shabbat Shalom!