Old Letters...

[nowalmart]

First things first, I suppose - both the ophthalmologist and the neurologist have given me the all-clear. I have to avoid any exertion for the next couple of weeks, along with avoiding any blows to the head for about the same amount of time. Other than that, though, I am pretty good to go.

So all of this time confined to my bed has left me a bit productive, however. Yesterday I finally got a conversion process in place to be able to read my old WordPerfect/Mac files from the mid-90's.

Last night I got through about a third of the files for conversion, mostly old letters that I sent to friends. This morning I started looking through some of them, along with some files I created in AppleWorks on my Apple //gs. The AppleWorks letters are from about July 1990 - July 1993. The WordPerfect files are from about September 1993 - September 1997.

These letters, especially earlier are, formed about the sole basis of communication I had with friends from places like VAMPY. These were days when very few people had even heard of the Internet, and long distance was still prohibitively expensive (for point of comparison, I just looked it up. A long-distance (200-400 mile call in the mid 90's was about 30 cents/minute during the day and 15 cents/minute during the evening)

Yeah, this was definitely the time before the prevalent cell phones with free long distance and unlimited nights and weekends.

Looking back through these old letters, though, brings about two immediate reactions. The first is slight embarrassment. "Did I really write that? Did I really think that?" I suppose I was in high school, though, so some forgiveness must be included. The second reaction is a bit of nostalgia. Friends that I poured my heart out to but am no longer in touch with.

I am hoping I actually get to a point where I can read through a few of them without visibly cringing on occasion. We will see.

These files do chronicle my life. I can look back and reconstruct my thought process as I decided to go off to college a year early. I can follow my adolescent development. I can look at the papers I wrote for classes and easily see the maturation of my thought process.

One of the more interesting parts is the chronicle of my love life, such as it was 10+ years ago. Brigid, Christina, Kasia, Sara. You know, back when it was actually fairly active.

Ah, to be young and think you know everything. Now I am just an old man, not really sure of anything.

In other news, I found this to be a pretty interesting read.

[Source for the long-distance rate data: http://www.fcc.gov/Bureaus/Common_Carrier/Reports/FCC-State_Link/IAD/ref98.pdf]

Comments

[bigpeteb.livejournal.com]

Some show I was watching on the History Channel made a similar comment on modern communication. They said that with people who lived decades or centuries ago, it's easy to know them, because so much correspondence is saved. Today most daily correspondence gets lots, because it's on the phone, or on some online medium with no records saved.

[nowalmart.livejournal.com]

I had considered adding in a paragraph that talked about that fact. It is one of the reasons that I log all of my my online chats and save all of my email. I am not sure who would ever want to go through the thousands of pages of my correspondence, but I am arrogant enough to think it is possible.

[nowalmart.livejournal.com]

This does bring up an interesting question, especially in regards to the recent discussions that have been going on around the Internet, regarding archival formats.

Currently the very old AppleWorks files are in straight .txt format. I have no doubts that I will be able to open those decades from now (provided the physical media they are kept on stays readable).

The WordPerfect/Mac v2.1 files are still in their original format. I have done some work converting them to .rtf. I could also convert them to OpenDocument format (.odt), but that spec still seems pretty young to put my confidence in.

Currently OpenOffice opens WordPerfect/Mac v2.1 files, but of course I cannot assume that will always be the case.

[bigpeteb.livejournal.com]

That's a very interesting question. Theoretically, any open spec should be readable forever, but in practice that's not really the case.

That issue, by the way, is why I never recommend that someone shoot in RAW mode on a digital camera. Aside from the massive inconvenience of having to "develop" the RAWs by hand, for very little increase in quality, the formats are also all proprietary, and have no lasting power. The JPEG spec isn't going to be forgotten any time soon.