Barbara J. Hamby

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Mixed Media

Today I found diskettes containing many missing poems and articles that somehow never got moved into new computers. Now I need to set aside a block of time to get them moved. With a flash drive, it shouldn’t be nearly as time consuming as it once was. The bonus is that the flash drive can be a backup, as well.

Because computer equipment becomes obsolete so quickly, I need to get everything off diskettes as soon as possible. My new notebook computer doesn’t even have a slot for diskettes. It takes CD’s and DVD’s only.

Just a few years ago, when a writer left behind a collection of unpublished work, it was either handwritten or typed on paper and fairly easy to locate. With all the technology writers utilize now, work can be scattered around on various types of equipment. Unpublished manuscripts may never all be found.

In the case of obscure writers, that may not be a big problem. But, with letters having been replaced by email by most modern people, history may suffer. Much of our history has been captured in old letters in the past. I wonder if anyone is working on technology to recover emails many years from now when all of the computers we’ve used since email began are in landfills.