Saratoga News

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Floppy disks have come and gone, but memories remain

By Carl Heintze

Yesterday I was cleaning out my office when I came across an accumulated collection of what used to be known as floppy disks for my computer.

Floppy disks were neither floppy nor exactly disks. Rather they were adaptations of what once were true floppy disks. The original floppies were thin plastic circles on which were inscribed little bumps, the offs and ons which are at the heart of all digital technology. And they really flopped. Well, sort of. At least you could bend them.

The floppies in question don't bend, but they're still called floppies.

Over the years of the evolution of the computer, the floppies became rigid, were encased in protective plastic shells and then went on to become the current version of the floppy: the CD that can hold anything from collections of pictures, collections of music or collections of words. CDs aren't floppy. They don't even bend. They're not indestructible, but pretty much so.

In my case, my floppy disks are collections of words--thousands, perhaps even millions of words I've written over the past 20 years or so and which I stored up in the vain hope that someone other than me someday is going to want to read them.

On my collection--although I am no longer sure--there are supposed to be essays, a couple of novels, some short stories and maybe even a poem or two and a lot of pictures of my family taken over their growing-up times. Now and then I used to sort of wander through this collection, haphazardly looking at bits and pieces of my past.

But I can't do that any more. Or at least I can't do it without a whole lot of trouble.

That's because the age of the old floppy disk has passed. No one uses them much any more. They don't store enough and they have enough mechanical parts so they tend to malfunction in time. CDs are much more reliable. They also hold a lot more of whatever it is you're trying to store.

So computers are no longer made with floppy disk drives, and neither of my computers (I blush to admit I have two) has a floppy disk drive. I could perhaps try to find an older computer and insert the disks I have, but most of what's on them is either not worth saving or is simply unreadable.

There is, for instance, my novel about mountain climbing, written in the days when I was enamored of mountain climbing. I never climbed any mountains myself, but I read a lot about it from those who had and then I tried to write about it. A hardly worthwhile idea.

There's also a collection of short stories about the valley where I grew up. One of these actually got published. There is, however, a copy of all the same stories, including that one, in the Stanford Library, so I guess there is no need to save that disk.

There's a lot more of this kind of thing. I won't bore you by going through it. The main thing is I decided to throw them all away.

This sounds simpler than it was.

The floppies represent what to me is an important part of my life. Parting with them was something of a wrench on my psyche. I knew I probably would never look at all of them again, but on the other hand, if I junked them they were gone forever. Somehow that seemed so final.

Parting with them also turned out to be physically difficult. Electronic waste--which is what they have become--isn't supposed to be dumped just anywhere. I had to find a recycling facility.

But then I got to thinking that the memories stored up on the now departed disks was not so valuable nor so permanent as those "disks" in my mind. The memories I carry with me of what was the core of my life: the last time the last child left home for good, the death of my last parent when I realized I was truly alone, the knowledge that one's no longer young.

I've cited sad memories, but there also are good ones at one's core: the first sight of the first child born to you, the sound of their voices on the telephone, the sight of New York harbor after being away in foreign lands fighting a war for a year and a half, the knowledge that amazingly someone loves you enough to marry you and spend the rest of their life with you.

These recordings, which I play over and over in my head, are the kind of disk which doesn't need to be recycled. It is preserved and playable as long as I'm around to do the playing.

So I tossed one set of disks and I polished the other in my memory, and I felt better after I had done it.