A Time of Magic

In times gone by you’d be thrown into the world of commercial printers offices and all kinds of complicated choices as to how to print your stuff.

These days, it’s a lot simpler and there are lots of online printers who’ll handle things like postcard printing for you. Generally speaking it is things like postcards that stymie home printers as they just can’t handle card thick enough for postcards. Photos are generally fine these days (though expensive on home printers) but if you’d like a really large enlargement or something on canvas then you’ll generally need to do this via an online outfit as few home printers can handle odd papers or really large ones.

And none of this is anything like as expensive as it used to be. A high quality poster sized print is under £20 these days.

When you’ve been in a house for a while, you accumulate things.

Whilst it’s not so bad for household items, when you start trying to collect things together in the garage you really need to start considering things like stainless steel drums to avoid all the problems that chemicals can cause very easily.

Of course, once you’ve everything in those drums you may well have the problem that you’ve nowhere left to park the car…

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.