A Glance into the Rearview Mirror

Lisa and I have hauled boxes of photos and negatives with us as we moved our household a few times through the years. Until digital cameras and then smart phones finally replaced our film cameras, we continued to add to this collection. I also hauled around a few boxes of old computer backups, including DVDs and CDs from more recent backups, but also floppy diskettes from decades ago.

The pandemic has given us time to devote to new pursuits and hobbies. Winter has now forced us indoors. Whether by duty or curiosity or simple boredom, I decided to delve into our ancient hoard. While I found many joys within the collection, I was surprised at the disappointments it contained.

I bought a scanner capable of scanning negatives and set into scanning them, two strips (8 to 10 photos) at a time, a few minutes per scan. The scanner is in my upstairs office, but I’m more comfortable working downstairs, so I’m getting a bit of workout swapping negatives every so often throughout the day.

As anyone knows from looking through old photo albums, it is heartwarming to revisit the camera-worthy events from our pasts. Back when we used film cameras, we had to pay to develop the film, so we were at least a little picky about which events we filmed, and how many photos we took. Nonetheless, we have a few thousand photos hiding within our negatives, and it is indeed heartwarming to see them return to life, a few at a time, in mostly random (date) order. If I could offer advice to my younger self, one suggestion would be to put dates on the photo packets.

The more challenging part of my hoard is the old computer backups. Though my laptop has no CD/DVD drive, my desktop computer does, so I can use that to browse through my old CDs and DVDs. But my collection also includes floppy diskettes, both the comparatively modern 3.5-inch, plastic-encased floppy, and the absolutely primitive 5.25-inch floppy.

To put all these in historical perspective, our computers were capable of backing up to DVDs starting in the early 2000s. Before that, we backed up to CDs starting in the late 1990s. And before that, we backed up to diskettes, the 3.5 inch variety starting in the late 1980s, the 5.25-inch variety before that. It has been over 10 years since any of my computers had a 3.5-inch floppy drive, and closer to 25 years since I had a computer capable of reading a 5.25-inch floppy. The oldest of my diskettes are over 35 years old.

My collection of diskettes includes important documents I created early in my business career. In that my career has been mostly in the realm of software development, the diskettes also include my early endeavors in writing computer software. I became curious to see the nature of my early works. As is true with cats, curiosity can be a dangerous thing.

I researched methods for how to extract files from old diskettes, and I found two approaches. For the 3.5-inch diskettes, I bought a drive that connects to a computer via USB, and it works well. For the 5.25-inch diskettes, I found a service which offers to copy files from the diskettes to a thumb drive. I packed up my diskettes, and sent them to California, with great anticipation to see what wonders they contain. A week later, a package arrived, returning my diskettes along with a tiny thumb drive. Of the 14 diskettes I sent, four were unreadable, likely because of age/deterioration. I copied the contents of the other 10 diskettes to my computer and began to investigate. This led to my next challenge: how to open/read files created with software that became obsolete decades ago.

Microsoft Word did not become the standard for word processing until the mid-1990s. Before that, I used WordPerfect, and before that WordStar. I discovered that modern Microsoft Word cannot open files created with this old software, nor even files created with early versions of Microsoft Word. The same is true of spreadsheet files. Before Microsoft Excel became the standard, we used Lotus 123 to create spreadsheets, and modern Microsoft Excel cannot open Lotus 123 files. Fortunately, I found websites which offer conversions from old file formats to modern Word and Excel.

My old documents reveal business plans, legal agreements, and correspondence with my business partners. As these documents predate my use of email, I can see only my side of the conversations — letters I sent and notes I wrote to myself. Perhaps, deep within boxes in my basement, I could find paper versions of these conversations, but that’s a project for another day. For now, these documents suffice to trigger memories of my work to start and manage a software company. They also offer reminders of my partners behaving badly.

It is said that the best two days for a boat enthusiast are the day you buy a boat and the day you sell it. I could say the same about partners in a business. At the start, partners share a vision, and together, you can accomplish much more than you could alone. But eventually, the vision blurs, and partners see the path forward differently.

If you were to hear me tell stories about my startup company, you might hear me speak fondly of my partners and our experiences working together. And while you might hear me say that I had challenges working with my partners, that we didn’t always agree on the company’s direction, you probably would not hear me disparage them (or at least minimally so).

A remarkable quality of time is how it can allow transgressions to fade into oblivion.

My old floppy diskettes brought long-forgotten transgressions back to life. As I read, my mind returned to ancient turmoils. Surprisingly (or perhaps not), anger regrew within me. I silently cursed my old partners. And then I put away the documents and took a deep breath. Let the past remain in the past (at least the unpleasant parts).

Having moved on from the documents, I set into rediscovering my old software. As with the documents, I encountered challenges, because a modern Windows computer isn’t capable of running most software from 25+ years ago.

Working backwards through my developments, I started with Wincite, an early Windows-based software, developed using Visual Basic, one of the dominant programming environments of the 1990s. It would be a wild goose chase to attempt to install and run Visual Basic on a modern computer, but fortunately I could open and view all the Wincite source code without Visual Basic. I have to admit it was underwhelming. It was adequate code, but I saw no genius.

Seeing genius is to see into the future, to see something at the far reaches of what seems possible today. Imagine Henry Ford contemplating a modern auto — he would see genius. When I viewed my old code, it was like Elon Musk contemplating a 1965 Ford Fairlane. My 1990s Wincite code may have seemed visionary to my 1980s self, but it seems primitive and bland to my modern eye.

Next, I attempted to look at code for Incite, the pre-Windows precursor to Wincite. Incite was developed within a development environment so archaic that I cannot remember how to use it (nor have I found any documentation for it). The source code is only accessible within the development environment, so I hacked my way along, inspecting files, running commands, working through error conditions, eventually bludgeoning my way into a view of the source code. As you might expect, it was even more underwhelming than the Wincite code, both because the programming language was more archaic and because my software development techniques were less refined.

As a final step into disappointment, I looked at some of my earliest code, developed using MS-Basic in the early 1980s. Calling this code primitive would be kind. The only positive I found is that the code is so inscrutable that it does not merit attempts to decipher what it does.

My old software did not reveal any of the brilliance that I felt while creating it so long ago. Instead, it is like reading papers you wrote for a political science class in college, or for a social studies class in high school. You may have gotten an ‘A’ on the paper, but what you wrote probably seems both amateurish and irrelevant today.

Having spent over $100 on diskette conversion, and a few hours of time investigating the contents, I pursued one last adventure: to see my old software running. As I said before, a modern Windows computer isn’t capable of running most software from 25+ years ago. But techie/hacker that I am, I took a whack at it.

I might attempt to explain the technical details of what it took to run the software, but I doubt that most people would much care about such esoterica. Instead, I’ll skip ahead to the payoff. I succeeded in running both the Windows-based Wincite and the text-based Incite. I experienced a glimmer of joyful remembrance, of my years spent bringing the software to life, and working to customize it for my clients.

However, I felt much like a filmmaker rewatching his earliest films, or a rock musician listening to his earliest music, or an engineer reviewing his earliest creations. There may have been a spark of genius in these early productions, but advancing technologies enable greater works, and experience begets profound refinement. It is intriguing to look into the rearview mirror, but beware that what you find there may disappoint.