What Remains. An Ode to Paper
Filed Under (To Get To The Other Side) by Estee on 27-10-2009
I love paper. I am noticing just how much by moving from one house to another. I have boxes and boxes of it. I have old stories. I keep every journal I’ve ever written. I have The Toronto Star of when man first landed on the moon and it’s in perfect shape. I keep reports, notes, love letters and cards. I love flipping through old books of my writing and feeling the weight of the pages with ink on them, not to mention the sound. And let’s not mention the smell of old books!
Speaking of moving, I’ve also kept a series of old computers. Remember those? The ones where I could actually write in the code (MS Dos, Wordperfect)and understand where it was going to take me? I owned a very small computer when I was living in Europe fifteen years ago — the year before I met Adam’s father. I did a lot of writing back then. Now that life has taken another turn, I enjoy going through old pictures, journals and I thought it would be really exciting to look up my old writing on the old computer. If paper and these “artifacts” are all that remains when I am gone, then I feel it is good for the soul while we are living to review where we have been.
Ack.
I can’t get into the thing. I can’t remember the code to the old programs. So I got to thinking — what of all this data stored on blogs, the Internet that we think will never disappear? I can tell you, just fifteen years — ONLY FIFTEEN YEARS — seems like over one hundred. Heck, it might as well be ten thousand years or more — we can dig up old parchment and read cave walls better than we can get into my old Compaq.
What artifacts will be left behind of our thoughts, our writings, our ideals, our achievements if we put them all on computers — the ones that change in time spans of one year, never mind a lifetime?
I love writing on the blog, but I will never ever get rid of paper.
ESTÉE KLAR
TORONTO, ONTARIO, CANADA
Writer.Curator of Art. Founder of The Autism Acceptance Project. Mother of Adam. I like to write about our journey, musings, attitudes towards autism.
I have a printout of the original “Ooops…Wrong Planet! Syndrome” website – it is a single sheet of paper (on a Geocities site). I have a later printout…. the stack of paper is 3-4″ thick. The site was taken down how many years ago now? The box of printed out incarnations remains…
I printed out The Joy of Autism blog before I archived it (on right margin here if anyone dares). It’s 800 pages. But you see? I still need the hard copy!
hmmm. I’m just unloading all of Adam’s work too. It’s prolific!! I’ve kept every marking. I’m going to hate the day when I have to cull it and keep only bits of it. Every marking has been so meaningful and significant to me.
The blessing/curse of the digital age is that on the one hand, it’s easier than its ever been to write/record records of virtually everything that happens to us, all the time.
On the other hand, out of all those digital files, pictures, and movies, about 99% of it will be lost forever. Perhaps 1% will remain on some cloud server somewhere. I have 16mm home movies of my wife’s grandparents from 1930, but have lost access to old WordPerfect files on 51/4″ floppy discs from the 1980′s.
Joe
Currently, my strategy for backing up my main computer involve unloading my stuff on my laptop because it’s more convenient than copying it to dvd (i have accumulated many backup dvds over the years).
regarding papers, I have papers dating back from 1982 on up which I plan to keep for many years.
Alain
I’m very much the same way — I’ve been doing creative writing since grade school (just started again after a 13-year dry spell) and still have most of the things I wrote out by hand while doing medical treatments away from the computer. I’m rediscovering, too, how much I enjoy doing that; might even start writing down random things in a journal intermittently all day, like I did for years after reading Harriet The Spy as a kid.
I also still have my childhood TI 99/4a and Apple IIgs, too. :o) While I can’t help with your files, the friendly guys at http://www.vintage-computer.com/vcforum/ will tell you how or just do it for you personally.