A Time of Magic

Our solicitor recently moved offices and, of course, needed to move all the old wills and whatnot that accumulate in the offices of solicitors over the years.

One of the problems with such filing is that there’s rarely a computer record maintained over the years as, frankly, it’s not realistic to do that over what could potentially be a period stretching over many decades. Think about the changes that even your own personal computer systems have gone through over the last 30 years or so. Back in the mid 70s chances were that you would have one of a number of totally incompatible systems but let’s assume that you were lucky in your choice and chanced upon one of the two standard systems of that era. You’d have chosen either an Apple 2 or something based on CP/M. If you’ve any discs from then, you wouldn’t be able to read them with todays equipment as 8″ floppy drives haven’t been available for decades.

But suppose you copied them onto the latest IBM PC system when that came out in the early 80s. There at least you would be ahead as you can still get systems that’ll read the 3.5″ discs introduced by the mid-80s. However, if you merely copied your Visicalc spreadsheets or Wordstar documents you’d not be able to read them in Excel or Word unless you’d converted them into 123 or an early version of Word as used on the IBM then. Even Excel and Word are themselves a problem as they used a number of different file formats over the years.

Thus ye olde filing systems use paper.

Just about everyone has a camera phone these days but they’re not really up to recording your memories of a holiday as they basically don’t have enough memory nor have they the flexibility to do that.

For that you need to start trawling through the camcorder reviews where you’ll come across a whole new world of acronyms and technologies. However, it’s not nearly so complicated as it first appears.

To begin with you need to think about whether you want to use a card, DVD or tape based camcorder. The DVD ones get quite bad press sometimes basically because not all DVD players can cope with the small DVDs that these camcorders use and there’s the issue about how long they could be expected to last. The tape based ones have been around a long time and use the miniDV standard which will hold about an hour of video. They’re larger than the card based devices and you’ll need to use cables to copy the movies on to your computer.

The other consideration is whether to use standard or HD video. In practical terms there’s not much of a difference in cost these days and HD will almost always be your best choice. This will use up more cards but doesn’t require any space on the tape as compression is used with the miniDV standard.

Finally, there’s the issue of what to do with the used media. With miniDV you may as well keep the original tapes as they’re very cheap but the cards can become quite expensive. If the only copy you’re keeping it that on your computer, don’t forget to keep backup copies as otherwise you’re sure to lose your movies at some point in the future.

If the marketing companies could get a definitive answer to that question we’d be even more inundated with the give aways than we are at the moment.

Of course, the problem is that there are many different reasons why things are collected and kept. I still have the stress ball from an IT convention from many years ago largely because it was the only time I’ve been to a place giving those out: it was unique. A few years ago I remember one stand being swamped because they had cute little pens and those were kept for a while ’til the likes of IKEA started handing similar things out: another unique item. Then there’s the personal reasons: I still use the promo keychains or rather keychain, singular, given with the £60,000 computer system I bought almost 15 years ago basically as a reminder of how daft the procurement people were at that time. I’m quite sure it’s the most expensive keyring in our street!

That unique quality is something worth searching for in items that you give away but requires you to move outside the standard catalogues and make that little bit more effort.