Rumor has it that I'm a getting a new computer for my birthday. AJM has been encouraging me to do so ever since the screen on my PowerBook G4 fizzled out. However, every silver lining has a black cloud and a new computer means another round of data transfer, of migrating to a new system.

My first computer, in 1985, was a Mac 512k. It didn't have a hard drive. I started writing in MacWrite, but fell in love with a program called MindWrite. It was a combination word processor and outliner and very flexible. I had to buy a memory upgrade an an external floppy drive to run it. And in those days, I seemed to spend most of my time on the computer inserting disks to complete a command. I lugged the Mac to Japan and back (this was our idea of a portable). And it finally gave out in 1992.

I replaced it with a new Mac Classic with an amazing 20MB hard drive. It was so fast! I didn't have to spend all my time inserting disks in the floppy. I could just write. Then I became a great fan of FrameMaker. I became a Frame training consultant and I used FrameMaker on all the documentation projects I did.

By 1994, I was doing all my writing at work in FrameMaker on a PowerBook Duo. Somewhere along the way System 8 came along and MindWrite wouldn't work with it. So I began migrating my personal files to FrameMaker.

In 2001 I got my PowerBook G4 with Mac OSX with a 20GB hard drive. Adobe had bought FrameMaker but decided not to migrate it (which seems so idiotic since FrameMaker was designed for UNIX systems and easy to learn for anyone who know emacs; so it's perfect for software documentation in a UNIX shop). For the past 4 years I've been doing most of my writing in BBEdit, but also running System 9 so that I could access my FrameMaker files. With my new computer I won't be able to do that. So now I'm in the process of migrating all the FrameMaker files to text files. No more proprietary file systems for me.

And it's not just my text files that I'm losing access to. I can't view the video that I took in Japan because my Sony 8mm camera broke before I could transfer the files to the mini-DV. And we have thousands of photos that exist only in electronic memory. More and more our music files are electronic. In the move from vinyl to CD it took me almost 20 years to get a turntable to let me access my old records, which we are now in the process making digital copies of. I get the feeling if we ever finish, it'll be just in time to migrate them to a new system. Let's not forget the old laserdiscs I bought in Japan, some of which are not available on DVD in the US.

If I weren't such a packrat.