It Is Alive

I have a storage area in the studio which is used as a final resting place for equipment that becomes outdated. My wife and I began the process of cleaning out that storage area last night. We were forced into this radical action because there is no space remaining in the storage area. What kind of equipment is in there? I have an old D&R series 4000 recording console. This is a pretty large piece of equipment in its own right. Roughly 7 feet wide, 5 feet deep and about 300 pounds. I have cables, amplifiers, speakers, monitors, computers, files, tapes, and more in that space.

We began by exploiting the divide and conquer approach. All of the old computers were brought out first. There were 6 computers, four monitors, a scanner, assorted modems, mice, keyboards and many computer cables.

It was obvious to me that a couple of the computers were ready for disposal. They were incomplete units. One of them consisted of a case and power supply. Two of them were full machines.

I powered them up. They still worked! One of the computers was a Compaq DeskPro. This computer had a 100MHz Pentium MMX processor, 32MB of RAM and 1.6GB of storage. The last operating system I had put on that machine was Windows 98. I could not believe how slow computing was back in the mid to late 90s. My current video cards have more processing power than this Compaq.

However, what totally distracted us from making progress on the storage area was a journey back in time. I had left the hard disk intact and it contained all sorts of documents that have sentimental value to our family. Thankfully, I can still recover that data and move it to a media where I can do a better job preserving some of the memories we have created on an electronic basis.

Thank goodness I did not just throw that machine out!