Phthursday Musings: Digital Junk, Digital Treasure

The last week of calendar year 1992, I went to Best Buy, and came home with a package: a Zenith Data Systems 386 and monitor, and an Epson 9-pin printer.

That ZDS 386 was my primary computer through the last year and a half of high school all the way until my senior year of college. Over that time, various exciting things occurred, even though it topped out at, I think, 4 MB of RAM. I ran a BBS off of it (ihop - international house of phear), I ran Trumpet Winsock (but who didn’t?), you name it.

Along the way I accumulated files.

The analogy I would draw here is between a computer and a home, between files and “stuff”. You live in a place for a while, and you manage to accumulate stuff. Books, clothes, papers, umbrellas, balls, knickknacks, tchotchkes, bric-a-brac, you name it. Some people refuse to allow stuff to take over, and are ruthless about gatekeeping. Other people just have shit-tons of stuff.

At some point, you and all your stuff move to a different home. Maybe some stuff gets left behind or thrown out. But stuff has a way of coming along for the ride. Books? Along for the ride. Clothes? Along for the ride. Tchotchkes? Along for the ride.

And so it goes with computers and files. My old 386 came with an 80MB hard drive, and that was an era where you didn’t just accumulate email attachments or the like. If we ignore that I ran a BBS with file-sharing capabilities, the kinds of files I was liable to accumulate back then were minimal: papers I wrote for school, weird crap I programmed in Turbo Pascal, etc. But files did accumulate. And once I was on the file-sharing BBSs, more files showed up, and once I was on the actual Interwebbings, even more files showed up.

And then one day, the 386 was replaced by a 486. Files moved over, just like stuff might move between apartments.

And then one day, the 486 was replaced by a Pentium. And then a different one. And then a different one? And then a laptop? And then another laptop? And then a work laptop? A second work laptop? An external hard drive? Multiple external hard drives? Thumb drives? DVD-ROMs? Zip drives? Fluffy little clouds???

The upshot is that I have computer files which I created in 1993 which, today, I can bring up and look at almost instantaneously. Some of them don’t load correctly, some of them don’t load at all. It’s not unlike how I still have my VHS copy of What’s Up Matador and no VCR to play it on.

Meanwhile, somewhere along the line, I got a cell phone. Then I got a flip phone. Then I got an iPhone. Then I got another iPhone.

My iPhone can store 64GB of data. This is, roughly, 800 times more storage space than my old 386 had.

The storage is eaten up by apps, by music, by a couple other things, but mostly by pictures. Many, many gigabytes of photos and videos. All of which I’ve backed up over time. Just like, when pictures were taken and scanned in the past, they wound up as computer files, and got backed up somewhere.

Over time, as various computers took a dive, files would get copied to various backup entities. So much digital stuff piled up. And on my main backup entity - a 2TB external hard drive - I had a folder called Backups, and in there I had a lot of crazy crap. I would have some of the same files backed up five different times.

The photos were the catalyst. I’ve got a 7 year old, and approximately 67,149,421 photos exist of this kid, many of which are still on my phone. Back it up, back it up, back it up, and… chaos. All of which was ultimately compounded by something subtle Apple did with the most recent iOS drop. It used to be that when you copied photos down from your phone to your computer, they were jammed into folders essentially sorted by the date on which they got added to the phone. But suddenly, the photos are coming over sorted by the date on which they were taken.

So if my mom took a picture of my kid doing something goofy in her backyard in 2017, and sent it to me last month, under the old protocol, that picture would be grouped with pictures I took last month. But now, it’s grouped with other pictures from 2017. And to be clear, I prefer it this way! But this made all of the archiving insane.

Over the last month, then, I embarked on a major consolidation project, to simplify all of the backups, to delete the quadruplicates of things, etc. Along the way I came across almost 30 years of files.

Files like this:

This is SWIRLY3.jpg. It is a fractal, produced with whatever that DOS-based fractal program was, probably some time in early 1994. The metadata doesn’t tell me exactly when it was created because the file has been copied so many times. But yeah, that sure looks like 1994, doesn’t it?

This thing is in a folder called Fractals, which is in a folder called Documents 1993-1994, which is in a folder called Murmur, which is in a folder called Miscellaneous. Before the big clean-up occurred, there were three different folders at that level named something similar to Miscellaneous.

Another folder at the same level as Fractals is one called Winnebago Speeches. This includes the salutatorian speech I gave at high school graduation, which, good lord, I’m not sharing here. Let’s just say that I opened by quoting Jim Morrison.

The Murmur folder… well. Back in the old BBS days, people didn’t log on with their real names, everybody had handles. After shuffling through a couple of others early on (most notably Pinky, which was a reference to a rock band, not a small finger), the handle I settled into was Murmur. To this day there are still people who, if they saw me on the street, would greet me as Murmur.

And the Murmur folder includes absolute madness, including all of the files from my very short-lived website dedicated to The Commish, and, uh, this:

All of these things are still from an ancient time, though, a time before I started collecting PDFs of AT&T bills or taking pictures with a digital camera.

What on earth is the point of keeping all of this around? Well. What on earth is the point of keeping around birthday cards from when I was 11? I don’t know. I don’t know how to think about it all. I do know that it took a lot of prelude to lay it all out though.

I feel like the oldest files I have, although probably the most intriguing files in a lot of ways, are nevertheless in a realm where, if you weren’t quite there at the dawn of the web, you might just be baffled into boredom. Describing how I ran a BBS out of my dorm room feels a bit like describing how you needed to crank a Model T to get it to run. I mean:

Hey Kid - You ever download a Deep Purple FAQ from a Renegade BBS?

Almost nothing in that sentence is going to make sense to the average 24 year old, and the average 64 year old is just going to start going DUN DUN DUN! DUN DUN DUH DUN! back at me.

Ah, but, fair META-SPIEL reader, you are anything but average, yes? no? tic tac toe? So surely all of this has made plenty of sense to you.

See? ihop. international house of phear. Perfect sense.

This is GATES.GIF.

It’s based off the Mandelbrot fractal. See, the idea is that every limb is a smaller version of its branch. The pattern could theoretically repeat indefinitely. This was very cool in 1994. I think. I have to admit that I’m not sure I ever actually talked to anyone else who thought they were as cool as I did. Then. Or since.

I thought about dropping dozens of weird images into these Musings. I thought about some long dive into what all of these files are about, what it means to keep them hanging about. And I kind of get stuck at that point. It all turns into a meta-discursion, because it’s ultimately not about fractals or SKI or whatever, it’s about the way I think about all of it, and it’s at that meta level where I have long been most interested in interacting with people.

I don’t remember when this was, I came up with an idea about interacting with people that went kind of like this. There are three levels of communication. There’s the superficial, the polite, the chit-chat, and that’s level one. There’s the deeply personal, and that’s level three. And then there’s some level inbetween, something that’s not so much a midpoint as it is something different in kind, where there’s not just a mixture of the superficial and the intense, but something bigger than either one. Like the jar of peanut butter today, where I had to stir and stir and stir to get the separated oil mixed back in with the rest. The idea may sound ludricous that the deeply personal isn’t the important level of communication, and, well, it is ludicrous, but that’s not really the point I’m getting at. The point is that when the peanut oil is separated out, the peanut butter just isn’t that good.

Among the nearly 30 years of files are all sorts of writings. Papers I wrote in high school. Song lyrics I wrote after college. All sorts of things I wrote for e-zines in the latter half of the ‘90s. Articles I wrote for Gapers Block. Any number of things I wrote for the Green Party. So very much writing.

Across years of school, across jobs, across relationships, across computers, it is clear that for 30 years, I have been trying to be a writer.

But, see, I never ever really bought into the idea that I could or should “write for myself”. Even the things which are most obviously intended for my eyes only feel like they were there to prod me to share something.

It’s not that, going back all those years, I can necessarily find a lot of stuff I’m super proud of. It’s more the exercise. I feel like I must have been writing more over time than most other people, it’s just that I kept finding odd ways to write and places to put it. T-files. Emails. Musings.

Maybe if writing were my actual job, the whole thing would melt down, I don’t know. But I do wonder if maybe I should have found my way to academia. Or if, even, maybe I still could or should. Or if not academia… I don’t know.

I figure I’ll keep this here up for a good while. And then, at some point, I’ll be doing something different. I’ve got almost 30 years of digital evidence to back me up.