My Memories Are Digital

I recently took a trip down memory lane. For most people, that involves watching home movies, calling old friends or looking at pictures in a dusty photo album. For me going down memory lane meant going through my hundreds of data CDs and seeing what was worth keeping and what was worth throwing in the bin.

In my early years as an IT guy, my labeling skills were non-existent. I would just burn a CD and not even label it. So looking through all of those CDs was like Christmas morning for me. I never knew what present was in store for me next.
The stuff that was in good shape and was worth keeping, I threw in a pile. The stuff that was all scratched-up and wouldn’t be read by my DVD-ROM got thrown in a shopping bag.

What was more interesting than the contents of the CDs were the reasons behind the contents being on the CDs. Many of the disks had a few applications on them and maybe some downloaded updates. The reasoning behind that was that back in 2002, when I started doing computer work for people, broadband internet wasn’t as prevalent as it is today. I would have to make a house-call and have to download something as simple as Ad-Aware or a Windows Update and it would take forever over their 56K dial-up connection. It really was worth my time to sit at home and download the stuff I needed and burn it all to a disc and take it with me.

Why burn it to a CD? Flash drives weren’t as prevalent back then either. I remember paying $45 for my first one and it only held something like 16M of data! Now I can buy a flash drive that is exponentially bigger for the same price.

Other little presents I found in the unlabeled CDs were operating system install disks from Windows 95 to Windows Vista and Linux: Kernel 2.1 to Kernel: 2.6.23. I also found versions of Microsoft Office going clear back to Office 97. The Windows CDs that worked, I was sure to create ISOs of and store safely on my file server. The Linux CDs (there were at least 50 of them all unsorted) I threw-out. If I ever need them I can just download what I need. I can’t remember the last time I needed Redhat 7.3. Windows OS disks I still need all the time for various reasons.

The discs that I made ISOs of, I tested their boot capabilities with Microsoft Virtual PC 2007. Surprisingly, only about 3 or 4 discs out of about 10 made it past the boot stage. All the rest were thrown in the bin. At least I know now what works and what doesn’t. And with all of them being LABELED, I can finally tell what is what.

In the end, I reduced my pile of about 300 CDs down to about 30. I found 12 blank CDs and DVDs. And I was able to put everything that had a case, back in its case. Go for a walk down memory lane sometime. You’ll feel as nostalgic as I do.