Wednesday October 6, 2004 Memories

Wednesday October 6, 2004 Memories

Our house has an excess of computers, an early Macintosh Power Book in the attic before PowerPC. In the den-office, a G4 Macintosh deskside computer with 17-in LCD display. In another bedroom, two PCs, one that I’m typing on is an IBM ThinkPad 2000 vintage running Windows 98. On a dresser in the same bedroom is a Power Machintosh G3 late 1990s Vintage, a desktop machine with 17-in. Optiquest CRT display, both purchased at Fry’s.

The G3 has the information store for all my early work from the early 1980s to the late 1990s. The ThinkPad takes over where the G3 left off. And the G4 has all the files from both machines in addition to a large collection of JPEGs taken with a Nikon CoolPix 880, a brick of a camera that takes great pictures as well as below average video sans sound. I have taken hours of motion video with the Nikon not to mention 100s if not 1000s of JPEGs, mostly of grandkids, models that do not make demands and will pose at the drop of a hat without requiring anything in return. In addition, I also have a Palm Pilot in the dresser drawer that hasn’t been used in a couple of years.

My wife wants me to get rid of some of these unneeded computers and I’m tempted but I’m reluctant because the computers have become an extension of my brain. I can go onto the G3 and find a name of a person I interviewed 20 years ago complete with the transcript of the interview. I recorded lots of conversations and transcribed a great many. I have a learning disability to wit, I retain very little detail unless I write everything down or key it into a word doc. I see forest but have a hell of a time picking out individual trees.

In this massive collection of information I’ve acquired over time—I clip news stories from NY Times, and AP, Reuters, UPI and other news services not to mention newspapers and magazines worldwide—is my memories. I also have boxes of Reporter Notebooks squirreled away in desk drawers, suitcases, and boxes from my years as a journalist. Most ot the entries are mundane facts about the companies and individuals I covered, an interview with two guys in their office building somewhere close to Santa Cruz. The two guys have since become captains of industry having sold their interest in that company and started others or invested in others. There on the pages of the notebook are recorded what we talked about during that meeting. And the detail captured is so much greater than my memory can conjure up. I remember their young faces and a gesture that registered with me looking back in my mind’s eye. In a sense, the contents of the PCs’ hard drives, and on boxes of floppies, Iomega disks, recorded compact disks and other optical media, and written in the pages of all my notebooks is the recorded history of everything I’ve done since 1979. I have my notebooks from college and some short stories and journals from before that time. But my professional career is contained in all these diverse media.

The notebooks and the PCs are also a repository of my attempts at creative writing as well as a recording of the mundane things one does on any given day. I found one notebook recently with entries dated Feb. 8th, 1979. It contains a list of items to purchase for our new house along with the prices I had estimated or priced for each item: mailbox, water softener, garage door opener, furniture for the bedrooms, sprinklers for a soon to be installed lawn—there is a price for enough sod to cover the front and back yard.

The notebook also contains the scrawl of my oldest daughter then 11 years old and my youngest daughter, then 8 years old. The book also contains a whimsical poem I wrote to my youngest daughter on her 8th birthday. Looking at these entries, I can almost remember what was going on in our lives that many years ago.

The Palm Pilot contains my first attempt to put entries in the calender of the handheld device for all the great moments in my life. I began with the simple things, birthdays, baptisms, marriages, other events of our family life. But then I started adding dates like the death and obit of someone I found memorable. I recorded events like the resignation of Richard Nixon, the start of the first Gulf War, and other major events that I found noteworthy enough to be recorded. It was also a way for me to quickly determine when something happened. I started pushing the envelope of the Palm however and quickly determined that its calender would only go back so far in time. I transferred everything over to the ThinkPad and put the Palm in my dresser drawer.

I will probably get rid of the computers that are no longer being used. But before I do I will transfer all the data from the disk drives in each to whatever new computer we have at the time. I will then remove the disk drives and either bury or destroy them. I don’t want to give my memories to anyone else. They can have the computer but they’ll have to get their own memories.