Hmmm... Interesting thread. Well, I like to take a look at what's on a hard
drive before I delete everything(or rather IF I delete anything?), but in
most cases it's so boring it's not worth the time it takes to look at it...
I got a few 8088's from a mental health place, and they really wiped it
good... Although there might be something readable through the screen burn-
in ;-) Other times people sit there and delete stuff before it gets carted
away, and sometimes they don't care(don't remember?), and you get all sorts
of goodies... A Mac II I recently got had TONS of Word and Excel documents,
but I deleted everything... It just didn't look interesting. Long gone by
now, I reformatted the drive and upgraded the system software by the next
day... Or there is the Mac LC II, which the person sat there after bringing
it over and deleted a few things. Or there is the Series/1 minicomputer
from an insurance place, I don't know if anything is on the drives or not
and I won't find out until the system is running, but I doubt that they
deleted anything... It would be too hard to set the system up again and go
through everything to make sure, but I don't even know what they used it
for. They did mention something about fiber-optic setups through one of the
cards I couldn't ID... OK, back on subject. Anyways, it's kinda fun to go
through the stuff, more so if it's deleted and you have to work on getting
it back, and when it's already there it's usually boring. I'm not sure why.
Those 8088's were completely wiped, nothing recoverable. And then there was
the time I got a 386 and IBM laser printer previously from the Trailblazers
office, which had an email program and some other stuff. Kinda fun to poke
around in, but any documents/email was long ago deleted... Personally, I
like getting interesting stuff off of the drives. I play around with the
software, read some of the stuff on there, but it gets boring fast and I
delete the stuff after a few days, mostly unread. Same goes for most of the
software. And I kinda get depressed when I know they are deleting stuff
from there... But when I get rid of computers, I just delete everything and
get the OS back to normal(I didn't know an autoexec.bat file could get so
big...) and sometimes reinstall it, but no interesting software or docs...
My stuff is boring when it leaves, but I love getting the stuff. :-) As for
where this entire thing started(that hubble stuff, right? or maybe that was
somewhere else...), anything REALLY interesting, especially with possible
historic value or sensitive info, I would contact the previous owners.
Hehe... Maybe we should start an FTP site to upload all the interesting
stuff we find on old computers ;-)
--------------------------------------------------------------
|
http://members.tripod.com/~jrollins/index.html - Computers |
|
http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Lair/1681/ - Star Trek |
| orham_at_qth.net list admin KD7BCY
|
--------------------------------------------------------------
Received on Tue Mar 31 1998 - 22:54:50 BST