I opened the time capsule

Yesterday, I bought this handy organizer and decided to put inside my CD and DVD collection taking advantage of some free time I had [Yes, it's nice to have free time once in a while ;-)].

I knew the task was not going to be finished until I actually opened The Chest.  You see, The Chest is an old Canon Pixma iP1000 printer box that has been sitting in my office for seven years.  I packed old notebooks, CDs, and DVDs inside and closed it with duct tape.  Time erased from my memory whatever was inside of it, for the last occasion in which I opened it was perhaps five years ago.

So,  I cut it open, expecting to find more old notebooks than CDs or DVDs.  However, the contents of the box were only two notebooks and lots of removable media.

I was surprised; I did not remember having so many CDs and DVDs inside The Chest and gradually examined the lot.  That's when The Chest turned itself into a Time Capsule!

There were some movies that I forgot I had.  But the most interesting thing was that the bulk of the media was made up by backups of documents and programs...many of which I, one day, regarded as absolutely indispensable for my computer activities: there was, for instance, and old installer of AVG antivirus 6, Blaze (a powerhouse all-in-one media player), and my installation media for Windows 98 (Wow!), ME(Awww!), and Vista (yuck!).  I even had the Windows ME start floppy and one of those promotional CDs that you got even inside cereal boxes with a copy of the "brand new" Internet Explorer 3.

Seeing all that made me think.  There was a time in which IE was the only browser I used and trusted.  In 2007, Firefox changed the landscape.  There was also a time in which my computer using experience was dominated by anxiety and fear, so I made all sorts of backups (my Master's thesis was erased by the hideous virus Sircam and that taught me a lesson).  In addition, crashes were so problematic and common that I could not live without installation CDs.

Last time I experienced a crash was... boy, I don't remember.  I haven't made a document DVD backup in more than two years.  On Dec 21, 2012, when I migrated my desktop from Mandriva 2010.2 to Mageia 2, I used the same /home partition and haven't had any problem.  Yet, there I was, holding backups from 2008, 2003, and 2001, the silent witnesses of a past computer experience that I am not familiar with any longer.

 Truly, the old times are not necessarily "the good old times".