The past few weeks have mostly been focused on The Boxes Full of Random Files. In the beginning of the packing process I was being terribly meticulous, organizing and weeding as I put things into boxes. Then I realized that, at that rate, I'd be moving sometime in 2016, so I sped up. Then we actually *scheduled* the move, and it turned into a madness of, "Throw it all in boxes, and God will know his own!" Pack in haste, repent at leisure, as they say.
As a result, I'm throwing away a *lot* of what I am unpacking -- some of these boxes have turned out to be 90% recycling. (Why, yes, Jane and I *did* still have all of our bank statements from 1989. Which wouldn't be so much of a problem except that they have our social security numbers all over them, so those need to get shredded. *Sigh*.)
But there are a few gems. The box I hit today turned out to be about 50% made up of printouts of the original SCA Digests -- apparently, I printed out most of the first 100 issues. *That* is a rather cool little historical artifact.
Context, for those who hadn't been born at the time: in the beginning, there was the original SCA Mailing list; I believe it was sca@a.lcs.mit.edu; as far as I know, that was the Society's first-ever presence online. That died in May '88, not long after I joined it, due to technical difficulties, and was replaced by sca@mc.lcs.mit.edu, a more modern mailing list available in digest form. I was heavily active there, and (being me) apparently printed out much of the first year.
At some point, I'm going to have to dig through that for treats. A little quick skimming turns up fun details here and there -- for example, I had entirely forgotten that my original name for the Rolls Ethereal, before I put out the first edition, was "The Crystal Domesday Book". (I am amused that the Rolls were the *less* tritsy name.)
I'm curious whether this exists online anywhere. A quick search hasn't turned it up. The content is *similar* to that of the early days of the alt.sca newsgroup -- they were theoretically gatewayed to each other, but the gateway was notoriously unreliable in the early days, and much of what I have seems to be missing from Google's archive. At some point, I may need to scan this in, for the historical record...
