Cleanup Time

I promised my wife that I'd spend most of this long weekend cleaning up the office. It's been a while since I got my desk cleaned off, not to mention the various piles of clutter hiding in various corners.

I'm about halfway finished. It's been interesting. So far I've found:

• A $200 Series I savings bond — from 2007. I think I'll keep that.
• Family Circus Our House, a CD with what seems to be a game that lets you make like Billy and explore the house and neighborhood. For MS-DOS, at least it tells you to type D:\setup.exe on the command line. Takes up 3 MB of space. Never played. I think I'll send it to Stephan Pastis.
• Manual for lawnmower purchased in 1996 and broken down by 1998.
• About 50 blank 3-1/2 inch floppy disks. You want 'em, come get 'em.
• A Gateway 2000 System CD, from my very first Intel computer — I started with an Apple //e (see below).
• A copy of Microsoft Flight Simulator. Keeping that, I think it still plays either with Wine or Windows under VirtualBox.
• A wide variety of cheap CD encyclopedias, all dating from before Wikipedia, and even before that great and wonderful time when the Encyclopedia Britannica was online in its entirety, and free.
• The very first CD version of Halliday and Resnick's Fundamentals of Physics. I got it in return for writing a review for GEnie. It should be in my collection of reviews, but darned if I can find it.
• Zip Disks. Sans drive, of course.
• A Sherlock Holmes mystery game, complete with a large sheet of paper giving various clues. Also apparently for DOS, and also never played. Why did I buy this stuff?
• 5-1/4 inch (Yes) floppies for Appleworks, the Apple ][ spreadsheet/word processing/database software. There are even a pair of 3-1/2 inch floppies with it, and it runs on ProDOS, so apparently I bought it quite late in the game. I'm pretty sure my library database, circa 1990, is on another floppy somewhere.
• Along with that, big floppies of Sargon II, the great chess program. I actually played this one. Not well.
• And finally, a classic: 3-12 inch floppies for Borland Sidekick, the first great TSR (terminate and stay resident) program, and a great little calculator/calendar/whatever. You could pop it up, type in a note, go back to playing whatever text-based game you were playing, stop, type in another note, etc., all without going back the command line prompt. A great program for its time.

There are more nooks and crannies around here, if I find anything interesting tomorrow I'll let you know.