Today at work I fired up a "PowerMac 8100"—at the time of its purchase in 1994 the ne plus ultra of Mac yumminess (and heaven help me, I uncrated the beast back in the day!) that had not been nudged since Cheney was Shogun. The years have not been kind: the ADB mouse had rotted away (it was tricky shutting the thing down fingering the rollers—detach the mouse live and fry the ADB chip on the logic board, never a good idea). Fortunately there was another grime-encrusted unit in storage. The monitor fluttered violently, making it difficult to isolate the cursor onscreen. The commercial floppies from which I was attempting to recover data proved insufficiently readable.

There's a lot of stuff on that old workhorse that's now irretrievable owing to software developments, but there are also some files I'd assumed until today could be snagged for upstream conversion at my convenience. Looks now as though it's women and children first.

cordially,

...and that will be the lifeboat for such files as might potentially be useful. A less compromised unit in the office (a grey-and-white G4, circa 2001) can read the Zip disks and transfer the contents via USB 1.0 to a thumb drive. I know that my PageMaker 2.0 files from the late 1980s are irretrievable without costly and heroic measures (and there's no practical use for them today), but I think I've still got a machine somewhere with PM 4.2 that can still read archived PM 3 documents, assuming the floppies haven't rotted in storage. PM 4.2 can be read by PM 5, and thence by 6.5, and finally to InDesign. The undertaking may be more trouble than it's worth, but there are three or four book-length projects from back in the day that it would be useful to have to hand, even in text-only versions—assuming, of course, that those floppies haven't perished of neglect. Yeah, paper and stone are more reliable archival media.

Thank gawd that Illustrator reads legacy formats back to v. 1.0! I actually had a request last year to rebrand a document I created back during the Alzheimer Administration—I had fortunately long since saved all my Illustrator files from the eighties and nineties to a single CD-ROM, which appears to have preserved its contents impeccably over the long years of its confinement in a cool, dark file drawer.

cordially,