I’m tying up some loose ends in a garage where I have things. I’m pulling hard drives out of old systems that I used and am waxing nostalgic about them.

• My first household computer: the Apple IIc.
• My gone-to-college computer: the PowerPC 7100 with an astonishingly large 250M HD (oooohhh!)
• My first PC: A Micron Pentium Pro purchased with money from my post ISP office position.
• My second PC: A 200mmx that I bought off of a friend that I put a Voodoo (the first one) 3d card interlaced into a Diamond Stealth VGA.
• The laptop that my late friend gave me before took a quick exit courtesy of pancreatic cancer. Windows 95 installed from 1.44M floppies.
• The development machine I bought to work on embedded systems for the wind industry.

Many many boxes of assorted peripherals and gadgetry that are stories that will remain untold. I am going to give it all away today including my Nomad II MG with it’s elite smartmedia 128M memory card (though perhaps the word wafer would be more appropriate). I ran a lot of miles listening to that chunk of plastic.

I will have a collection of very small hard drives that I will no doubt be borrowing scsi adapters to conduct some forensics on myself. It should be fun to dig things up and archive old school work, irc logs, ICQ friends that I haven’t communicated with in a decade, and .rc files from the golden era of X11 gaming and adventures.

I also have some old but pristine VHS tapes with unknown things on them to transcode. I’m on the fence about keeping them. Perhaps it is time to let them go and save myself a lot of time processing them. I do still have my top of the line 6-head Toshiba VHS deck, so I may be the best equipped to do so. I was planning on setting up a shuttlepc, or perhaps a mac mini, as a mythtv media box after I have settled down again.

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