Although I cut way back in 2010, from time to time I still buy crap at garage sales and thrift stores that, in all honesty, I don’t need. In previous years I would bring those items into the house before I had a designated spot for them, and they would end up as clutter — sitting on the kitchen table or on the floor of my computer room until I could figure out what to do with them.
In the beginning of 2010 I set up a table out in the garage. The purpose of the table was to be a holding/sorting place for all incoming “treasure” until I could designate a home for it. Items that needed to be fixed or cleaned or that I simply didn’t have a spot for would sit out on the table until I was ready to bring them into the home.
You can probably see where I’m going with this. It’s September, and the table is piled high with crap. There’s an old 386 PC that I was going to do something with, a bunch of old computer parts, some books and videotapes I picked up somewhere or another, and lots of floppy disks for old computers.
Last night I went out to the garage to find something and decided to take a stab at cleaning a few items off the junk table. Right off the bat I spied some 3 1/2 disk boxes that could probably be trashed. A couple of years ago I took over a thousand of my old 3 1/2 floppy disks to work, degaussed (magnetically erased) them, and threw them out (not before backing them up to CD, of course). Occasionally I’ll buy plastic disk boxes to store old floppies in, but after throwing most of my old floppies away I don’t have a need the disk boxes.
When I picked these disk boxes up, I could see they were both filled with diskettes and taped shut with masking tape. The tape was so old that when I tried to peel it off it either broke or disintegrated. For the life of me, I cannot remember buying these disk boxes. I’m not implying any supernatural intervention here, nor do I think “Santa Floppy” snuck in one night and dropped off a bunch of old disks … I just really don’t remember buying them.
After I finally got them open I found old Amiga floppy disks, probably 300 in all. Unlike most old disk collections, this one contains a bunch of original game disks (so you can tell it wasn’t mine, hah). There are a lot of good games and programs in here. I don’t currently have my Amiga hooked up, but I think I’m about to. Maybe I could set it up out in the garage on that table …
That’s quite a bit of serendipity there. (/jealous)
Where in Time is Carmen Sandiego might or might not playable — I used to have the Mac version and it came with a book that was required to answer questions during the game. So a disk-only copy might require some googling and use of wikipedia to make it work.
When I moved away for good, my father had a few old Amigas to sell (a 1000, 2000, and 4000). He put up an ad on Craigslist and had fifteen responses within 24 hours! Not that I am recommending that you sell it as he ultimately did not get very much money (he mostly just wanted them out of the attic) but I like it that there remains some enthusiasm for them.
(BTW, I enjoyed your book!)
Huzzah!