Keeping stuff: How to preserve course papers despite technological change

Portable disks

When I came to Grinnell a year and a half later, I tried to bring with me some of the computer programs I had written. I had secured a larger account -- if I remember correctly, it was all the way up to 150 kilobytes -- and I had about a dozen programs worth preserving, mostly written in the Pascal programming language. Pascal had a very explicit public standard, and I hoped that my Pascal programs would compile and run without change on Grinnell's computer.

The problem was to figure out some way of getting them from Arizona State to Grinnell. Although the Internet existed then, Grinnell was not connected to it; at that time, Grinnell had an internal electronic-mail system, but no way to receive messages from off campus. Arizona State may have had some kind of network connection, but if so I knew nothing about it and had no access to it.

Hoping for the best, I arranged to have my programs copied onto a portable medium -- a nine-inch, single-sided floppy disk, which I brought with me when we moved. Unfortunately, that was a dead end. Grinnell College did not have and never acquired a nine-inch floppy drive. Since I also had paper copies of my programs, I was able to retype the ones that I most needed, and I was happy to discover that they did indeed compile and run on Grinnell's one academic computer with only minor changes. But the failure of the electronic-copying technology was a disappointment.