What to do with old developer magazines
I've been in a very nostalgic mood lately. Listening to a lot of older music (Husker Du, old Slayer, old Green Day, Tom Waits...I even saw Doug E Fresh in concert on Thursday night), reading a ton about Apple II computers (and semi-considering buying an older box, maybe a Mac LC w/ the IIe card, or finding a 486 so I can play some of these 5.25" game discs that I still have laying around). Maybe I'm about to have a mid-life crisis! :)
Last week I cleaned some stuff out of my grandfather's tool shed storage unit, which included a big box of older programming magazines -- issues of Dr Dobbs, C++ Journal, Game Developer Magazine, and so on. Mostly these were from '98 or '99; while a ton of the content is obsolete now, I did find the occasional article that still holds some weight (i.e. things related to pure C++ language features, algorithms, etc). I'm thinking of tearing out the still relevant articles and putting them in a binder for later reference (the pack rat in me just can't throw things out!).
However I'm also curious what other folks are doing. Do you just chuck old dev mags after a certain time period? Scan the articles and dump them into SQL? Build a shrine to your previous coding efforts? :)
Please contribute any ideas you have, even if it's just to tell me I'm too much of a pack rat. :)
--n
>>articles and putting them in a binder for later
>> reference (the pack rat in me just can't throw things out!).
That's what I do and it's a good start! I like those vinyl sheet protectors 'cause you can put stuff in them and flip through the binder easily and safely through the articles. A scanner would be nice too, but I'm old fashioned and I like to hold it in my hands. Even when I am learning a new tech skill... I (sometimes) print out the web page and read it 'offline'....
As far as old 5.25 games go, I have some drives you can use. Copy the game to your computer, and then play it in <a href="http://www.dosbox.com/">Dosbox</a>; (run's on lots of OSes).
As for the nostalgia, old machines, I say chuck 'em and don't buy more. I booted up an old Compaq 286 luggable the other day. It was amazing that the 5.25 drive worked, amazing that it booted up with dos, amazing; I type in 'win' and windows boots up faster then Vista ever will. But at the end of the day I had a 16mhz computer with 4 megs of ram starting back at me through an amber and black screen. Not all that useful ^^.