Have you ever walked through an antique store and wondered what some of the stuff was? Most of it we can recognize if it was something we actually used or knew of in our lifetimes. Example: A buggy whip or a Lava Lamp or even a Star Wars glass from Burger King. We know these things because we used them or owned them or had relatives that were associated with them. Ask the grandkids or even folks under twenty-five what a slide rule is. Ask my generation what an adze is or have them tell you what an Edsel is. Everyone lives in a world defined by our experiences and the age we were born in.
Technology is the same way, except that instead of generations or decades, the time frame for points of reference is years. For example, I studied the Fortran programming language in high school. I don’t remember any of it, have never used it and I doubt there are very many, if anyone using it today. I would also question if anyone would recognize an 8086 processor today. Your kids have no idea that there was truly a floppy drive at one time and it was five and a half inches wide.
George Will said, “The future has a way of arriving unannounced.” With any advance in technology there is the inevitable leaving behind of those things we thought were invaluable but with new advances are simply allowed to fade until we don’t think of them anymore. How about the cases of eight track tapes we used to all carry in our cars and have carefully stacked beside our stereo systems at home. Then our cassette tapes came and went. I still have a closet full of VHS tapes that I have hauled around for years, because I think they’re valuable. (Martha, don’t touch my Star Trek tapes.) Even my racks of music CD’s are obsolete now that IPODs and phones can store thousands of music tracks. In fact the storing of music is rapidly fading away as music is available on demand from the cell phone providers network or the Internet.
But… every so often there is something of some great value that gets caught in the transition and we find ourselves wishing that the gem we value could be retrieved, even as we begin to accept that it may be lost forever. Two clients of mine have sought my help on just this type of problem and with some luck; I was able to bridge the gap between obsolete technology or software and present day.
One client had a manuscript written twenty years ago. At the time, the most advanced “writer’s manuscript program” was purchased and the story carefully crafted and typed. Over 400 pages were created and stored on 5.5” floppy disks. In addition, a hard copy was printed and stored with the floppy disks. Then the story lay dormant until this year when our author decided to give the story to the world by having it published. But his new computer didn’t have a 5.5” floppy drive. That was solved by locating an old computer with a 5.5” floppy drive and a 3.5” floppy drive. I was able to copy the files, using DOS commands from the large floppies to the small floppy. Now we could an external usb floppy drive to view the files.
Problem two arose when we tried to open the files and the message appeared that Windows was unable to find a program that would open these files. Research on the Internet revealed that the program that produced these files had not been seen for twenty years and when it did exist, it was a DOS based program. What to do? There were over 400 pages printed, and my client was not enthusiastic about retyping them or paying someone to retype tens of thousands of words. Fortunately we had a hard copy of the manuscript.
I was able to show my client how to take each page of the manuscript and run it through his scanner, using OCR software (Optical Character Recognition) and allow the computer to convert each scanned page into a Word document. Once there, he was able to make changes and import it into a publisher program where the book was finished, proofed and is currently awaiting printing. Created by obsolete technology, nearly lost, brought back by new technology only to be printed into a form invented nearly 600 years ago. What comes around goes around.
The next client had a very valuable address book created with a DOS program. Until recently he still had a functioning DOS computer, and Pin Printer. (Another thing most folks don’t remember.) But the computer wasn’t available any more, and he needed these address in order to create some mailing labels. After some thought, I decided that since these addresses were in DOS, it was likely that they used an old format called ASCII. If that were true then they might open in Notepad. Notepad will open almost any file. It may not be readable but it will open. Sure enough, Notepad opened the DOS file, and we discovered that the DOS program had used commas to separate each entry from the next. Name, address, state, etc.
This allowed me to save the open file in a format called CSV. (Comma Separated Values) Now we had a file that could be imported into a spreadsheet program such as Excel and used as a database. Once that was completed it was very simple to open a word processor with label making capabilities and create sheets of labels on the DeskJet printer using preformatted label sheets from Avery. Yeah!
Sometimes we can pull the past along with us.
Don’t forget that Grumbles From The Keyboard, chock full of useful tips, tricks and how-to’s is available online at Amazon.com, Barnes and Nobles, www.grumblesfromthekeyboard.com or The Bean on 41 in beautiful Punta Gorda, FL. Get yours today! And did I mention that Grumbles is Santa approved? See it here. http://youtu.be/IeN8QfL0SUk
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Amazon.com: Epicuria: An Adventure That Really Cooks! (9781456561734): Court Nederveld: Books
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