RPS Asks: Do you still have your old sites, files, or floppy disks?
Inspired by Hypnospace Outlaw and old floppy finds
A friend recently found her old floppy disks from the 1997, uncovering a treasure trove of poetry, MS Paint art, homework, screensavers, and fanfic. Delightful finds which I feel privileged to have seen. I very much do not have my old floppies. They're all long-gone, chucked along with all my old websites and blogs and CDs and everythings in strict sentimentality purges. I don't know if I now regret that. So with vintage Internet simulator Hypnospace Outlaw being our game of the month in the RPS Game Club, I'm wondering: do you have your old sites and stuff? Dare you share it with us?
I once kept old homepages stored on old floppy disks after their hosts went down, then still after I no longer had floppy drives. The same with CD backups then optical drives. But during a bad point in my life I decided to only care for the present (an incredibly mature philosophy, obvs) so I began to actively kill any surviving websites and bin the backups. Their fate was sealed by two things: 1) revisiting an old homepage saved on a CD, my ancient CSS was wholly broken in modern browsers and looked terrible, so what's the point; 2) I moved into a series of decreasingly small flats and ultimately from London to Scotland by train, which really doesn't allow space for even 3.5 inches of sentimentality. So long, decades of computering!
But you, reader dear? What do you have? What old homepage of yours have you found in the Geocities archive? What old domain do you somehow still have online? Where are your old floppy disks, and what's on them? And can we see? Please, can we see?
In my cool and heartbreaking hobby of reading mod readme files, I have enjoyed recently seeing a few people dig up ancient Doom maps and early efforts to release now. And I did really enjoy the years of digging random CD-Rs out the gutter to see what they were.
Hypnospace's Game Club month will wrap up with a live blog chat on Friday at 4pm BST (8am Pacific). We've written some fun bits and pieces about it across the weeks but do especially read our Liam's interview with Hypnospace head Jay Tholen.