Threehundred and fiftysix (356) CD-ROMs (my young assistant counted them) and
untold floppy disks went to the appropriate rubbish bins today. Floppy
disks are to be disposed off together with the regular rubbish, but CD-ROMs
are taken care of separately here in Germany, in what is called the “CD
Tonne” (the CD bin). It has a slit into which we slid two CDs at a time,
or a scratcher kind of thingy that destroys the CD when you shove it through
(useful for personal data backups that I was destroying). There where 3 CDs
and 2 floppy disks that I wanted to keep. The diskettes refused to be read on
the only drive I have left, and even the CD-Roms were unreadable, in spite of
trying on four different drives! I never expected the floppy disks to deliver
so that didn’t disappoint me, but the CD-Roms I made in 1992, and I certainly
didn’t expect those to die on me so soon. Nevertheless, the whole affair
brought a tear or two to the eye. Not because of the irrecoverable data (it
wasn’t that irrecoverable) but rather the amount of hard-earned money I’d paid
for copies of SCO Unix, Informix, Microsoft software (Visual C, Office,
Windows, etc.) and all sorts of other programs: I tallied up a bit and came to
about ten thousand DM at the time of purchase. I neither need nor use the
software today: Open Source has all I want.