Don't buy big houses.  You'll just fill them up with junk that you'll never see again!

You know the drill... I was down in the basement, and I was opening up boxes and...

Tonight I threw away an old TV, that no longer worked, a VCR, that is older than the ice age, that big box of Doctor Dobb's Journals, and an assorted box of MS Software that included such gems as:

VB 2.0 or whatever, Chicago SDK, NT 3.51 sneak preview, and blah blah blah.  Oh yah, and it included such gems as MS-DOS 6.0, Windows 3.0 (that one's probably a collector's item, and now it's collecting mold in the trash heap instead of dust on my shelf).

Imagine this: Chicago SDK Kit 12/07/1993

Then there's this funky one.  Imagine an all green CD that has written in spiraling black letters: Microsoft System Design Review - January 28 & 29, 1993 - Copyright...

I remember this one because it was the sneak preview for what was coming in NT.  Very exciting stuff at the time.  That was in my “anywhere but Microsoft” days.  Living in the SF Bay Area, doing the aesthetic thing with Steve Jobs and NeXT Computers.  I did see my NeXT disks, and BeOS disks, but I didn't quite have the stomach to throw those disks out.  Can you imagine, the first writable Optical disks were on NeXT computers!!  I still have a few of those cartridges.  Over time they became CD/RW, but that was quite a few years later.

As nostalgic as this stuff is, it's just junk.  I look at it, and sit down for a minute, and think about the history of comoputing over the past 15 years or so, and I smile because I've been a part of every interesting bit of it along the way.  All the wacky far out “beat the man” ventures that emerged, and now I'm with the team that everyone loves to try and beat.

There are two gems I found in particular that I probably won't be getting rid of.

Turbo Prolog - from Borland.  I was part of the beta program on that one, and it didn't really see the light of day.

A 380Mb Hard disk - I think this came out of my original NeXT cube, and it's probably a collector's item.  Again, to the Boston Computing Society, or the Smithsonian.

At the rate I'm going, I'm going to clear out enough of the downstairs to have another house.  Perhaps I'll install the growing lights and start doing some hydroponics.

At any rate, cleaning out my house is like cleaning out old APIs.  Some times you pick the things up, ask yourself how often you use it, get sentimental about it, then chuck it.  Make way for something new, or enjoy the newly found simplicity.

I'm loving the freedom of movement that comes from not having all that clutter around my feet as I move about my house.  I think I'm going to love the same thing as I play with the current Visual Studio code.  I'll be looking for places to simplify, and remove the clutter.