An antique computer and a digital legacy

Not my eMac, but it looks just like this.

When my younger brother passed away ten years ago, he bequeathed me all his genealogical research, including the contents of his 2002-vintage eMac. While the estate was settled long ago, the whole mess (I'm talking 30 years of research here, and "mess" is the operative word) had remained in the "custody" of my older brother, and had languished in a storage unit until two and a half years ago, when I finally had the time (i.e., had semi-retired) to make the 600-mile trip to New England to fetch it.

I filled the back of my (very spacious) Scion xB with boxes upon boxes of the most important-looking papers and reference books. I didn't come close to fitting everything in. The computer didn't make the cut. So a year later I made a second trip. (Neither of these trips were solely to pick up the research materials, but were just my last stop on vacation trips before returning home.) Once again I filled the back of the car with more papers and books. Once again, there was still plenty left over. Once again, the computer didn't make the cut.

Last year, I didn't have the time to make a trip north. But after sifting through much of the reams of paper I had hauled home, replete with marked-up drafts of various research reports, presentations, and possible journal articles, I had concluded that in most cases I did not have the final versions of these writings on paper. Ergo, they must be on the computer. Retrieving it became a priority.

This spring, when I decided to attend a genealogy conference in Providence, Rhode Island, I realized I would be close enough to my brother's house to make it feasible to stop by for the computer after the conference was over. The arrangements did not proceed without incident – he didn't know I was coming until I called him the night before (not one, but two, emails from me had inexplicably ended up in his spam folder), and Google Maps decided to to go AWOL from my phone just as I was leaving the hotel for my brother's – but eventually I found my way there. He had his visiting son lug it out to the car ("It's heavy," said my brother), where I wedged it in with a duffle bag full of dirty laundry, along with the keyboard, mouse, and power cord.

A couple of days later, I was home. When I unloaded the car, I discovered what a whopping understatement my brother had made about the weight of the eMac. I barely managed to get this behemoth into the garage and onto the folding table that I wasn't sure could take the weight for long. I've been using laptops and LCD monitors exclusively for so long I had completely forgotten just how much a CRT, even a fairly small one, weighs. (Later I looked up the specs online and found that it weighs an even 50 pounds.)

About a week later, I heaved it off the groaning table and staggered into the house with it, where I deposited it on the coffee table, which now has another dent in its top. I hooked up the keyboard and mouse, attached the power cord, plugged it in, held my breath, and pressed the power button. Look, this computer is thirteen years old, and hasn't been used for ten years (aside from my brother booting it up once some years ago just to see if it would). For all I knew, I might have just hauled home a 50-pound doorstop.

Lo and behold, it came on and booted up with no fuss whatsoever. OK, there was the minor fact that the computer firmly believed it was January 1, 1969, but what else can you expect with a thirteen-year-old onboard battery? Minor problem. I called up the System Profiler, and found that I was running Mac OS X 10.2, aka Jaguar. (For those of you who aren't Mac aficianados, the latest version of OS X is 10.10, aka Yosemite. Jaguar is, to put it mildly, ancient history.) More alarmingly, the beast possessed a grand total of 128 MB of RAM. Not what you would call expansive.

Still, it was running. And there, spread across the desktop (literally, every slot in the "grid" was occupied, with multiple files stacked in some locations), were a myriad of folders and loose files. (Evidently, my brother did not believe in the Documents folder concept.) With any luck at all, at least some of them would be the "final" versions of some of those research reports I was looking for. The first step would be to back up the files before the computer decided to, say, experience a catastrophic drive failure – which, given its geriatric status, was not at all far-fetched.

After resetting the system date and time, I started copying files onto a USB flash drive. The first problem I encountered was the glacial copying speed. In the time it took the bits to stroll through the USB 1.1 ports found on this very earliest of eMacs, I could almost have copied the files in longhand. On top of that, the OS apparently had allowed the creation of filenames containing characters like /, <, >, and & – and my brother had taken full advantage of this – but drew the line at copying said files. Every time it encountered one of these it would stop the copy operation dead. So I ended up going through directories and manually renaming all such files so they could be copied. In addition, the copied files all had their creation dates set to the current date instead of retaining their original date stamps. This seemed a bit ominous, but I figured I could always check the dates on the originals if I needed them.

Well, so far, so good. I finally had a copy of all my brother's files, including his email. But I still needed to be able to open, edit, and print these files. Did I mention that my brother's word processor of choice was AppleWorks, which was bundled with the system software (i.e., "free")? AppleWorks reached "end of life" status in 2007, and it won't run on anything higher than OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard). My MacBook Pro is at 10.9 (Mavericks). I still had some work to do.

To be continued...