I have plenty of laser-printed documents older than that, with no sign of deterioration.
Me too. Of course, there's no time bomb. Many documents are fine. But I have also seen many already badly deteriorated. The thing is you can't make an accurate prediction at the time of printing. And as far as archival goes, you can't predict what will be needed in the future (that's the purpose of archiving). So basically, you're making a bet, and that's not good.
Dot matrix impact printed documents should last a good long time as well.
Funnily enough, I had to go through a heap of pyjama-striped paper not long ago. I'm not that confident anymore. I noticed the ink had turned very pale, and some pages were barely readable.
...unless you do it professionnaly on acid and bleach free paper, with real ink. Laser toner won't stick to paper for more than 10 ~ 15 years, after that it begings to turn back to powder. Thermal (old fax) paper is worse, inkjet printers are marginaly better but don't expect anything to last over 30 years with home and office printing technologies.
I don't need the thing to handle Exactly Like Photoshop, but if it's going to be the "photoshop competitor" every FOSS advocate claims it is [...]
I won't speak in the name of others, but clearly The Gimp is not a competitor to photoshop. If PS was to be competing against The Gimp, Adobe would have to release native file format information, plus access to the code. For those among FOSS supporters like me, failing on both counts is a total show stopper for even considering a switch, much like the burden of your previous work is to you.
The Gimp is like the plank cabin you build on your grounds : there might be holes, it might not be completely comfortable, and the roof might even leak, but nevertheless, you're the king in your own private kingdom, because you're considered to be the owner of the place. PS is more like a rented flat : nice view, good furnitures, central heating, but if your landlord happens to be a complete moron, and suddenly decides to lock all the doors at 9 pm, you're fscked, and either you're in by the curfew, or you're homeless for the night.
I'm still holding out for "Redneck Rampage" forever. OMG, this game was SO hilarious... thank you for bringing back those good memories, it's so old the name had slipped out of my mind.
I wonder if any of those parallel-to-USB adapters work with Mac OS X.... The setup of choice would be to plug it into a jetDirect 'network to parallel' adaptater. You then can share any printer on a lan.
Inkjets do indeed tend to break easily, especially cheap ones. I had to put a Deskjet 520 (1993 vintage) in early retirement last year. I lubed some parts once because it was becoming noisy, and I had to clean the small sponge that collects spilled ink once too. It was still going strong, but alas, slowly ; so I bought a Brother laser to replace it. It's in storage now, after 14 years of good use, and by the look of it it might have gone another 14 years without any problem.
To start with, this just isn't true. People loved Windows 98 when it came out (Windows 95 was barely usable in terms of stability) and Windows 2000 had a similar impact again. There were dissenters for XP but they faded away with the arrival of XPsp1 - Vista sp1 doesn't seem to be having a similar effect. I accept that ME was a botched release but it got torn apart by critics and never widely adopted due to the problems with it. It's not implausible - although it's unlikely - that Vista will suffer a similar fate. Since Vista has more commitment from Microsoft than it's ME release did, I suspect that Moore's law will eventually come to the rescue.
While I concur, that's easily explained by the Stockholm syndrom. Let's get back in time ; MS-DOS 1.0 through 3.1 were complete POS. DOS 3.2 was finally apt enough right at the time DRI ultimately bit the bullet, leaving MS the only game in town for professionnal OS. Subsequent versions of DOS were POS too, but under pressure from the gaming industry, bridged the gap to bring the PC world alive out of the amigatari era ; finally, DOS 6.2 ran correctly enough when the home gaming industry parted with non-PC manufacturers. Provided you had 7 or more config.sys sections to launch everything you wished (lim-ems or xms, everyone ? Dos UMB or not ?)
We can draw the same timeline for windows. Win 1, 286, 386, 3.0, were complete failures ; not until 3.1 was windows barely tolerable, provided you add wing32 and a couple of things. In the 'NT' line, things were about the same until NT4. Then came 95 and 2K that weren't big hits but stabilised enough for day to day use after shitloads of service packs, the last one being win 98sp2 for 95. Let's count Me as a market testbed for some user features due to enter XP. Finally, comes XP, stable enough after 7 years of serious consumer abuse.
And now, Vista. So let me look at my crystal ball : in about a 5~7 years time frame, after countless SPs, bugs, consumer trampling over and smothering, Vista will be EOLed, and we will gather again to mourn the gone OS while bashing the new Redmond's bloatware.
Well, I won't be playing that silly game, because I left the boat around 1996 for a slackware 3 and never felt compelled to look back.
Having been both defiant and cocky for a long time as a student, because many teachers I had were plain idiots, I surprisingly never had to give a single detention when in turn I steped behind the desk. Know why ? Because I never felt threatened in my teacherhood by a defiant and cocky student. Moreover, I felt it was my duty to listen to his/her objections, and thought that there was a certain possibility that he/she might be right. That's what I call teaching - accepting constructive criticism, elaborating talks, and drawing conclusions. What you're talking about is herding. Completely different job.
The problematic part is that flash won't run on anything but an Intel-compatible processor, and the "proprietary" nature of flash makes sure that no-one else can adapt flash for another kind of machine. Not everybody have or wish to use an intel PC, as ubiquitous as it may be.
The litmus test for me is really the whole issue with the Catholic Church and birth control. The Pope, the designated representative of God on Earth, says that contraception is wrong yet most Catholics still use it. This is a very fundamental test of belief. If you honestly believe that there is an all-powerful being who controls heaven and earth and that Jesus died for your sins and left Peter as his successor, and that the current Pope is the spiritual successor of Peter and speaks with all of his authority, then you cannot possibly rationalize the use of birth control. Like it or not, most modern Catholics do not really believe in Catholicism --- they believe in something similar, but diluted enough for modern sensibilities.
You're forgetting that at the root of catholicism, there is the freedom of thought. Ask the first catholic priest about it, and he'll certainly agree. Grudgingly, but agree nonetheless. That means that if you believe contraception is not a sin, you do as you please, you don't have to confess it, and you take the risk of being proven right or wrong on judgement day. Being catholic is only believing in the credo (there is one trinity, father, son, and holy spirit, and they are all the essence of God, basically). You're not even required to pay any reverence to the Pope. That's the reason why a priest who breaks his vows and marry a woman remains a priest. He's kicked out of the 'administrative' part of the Church, can't have a parish or publicly serve the mass, but all the sacraments he hold are nonetheless valid, and while catholics are advised to avoid attending such sacraments, there's nothing to nullify them once received. It goes as far as permitting (and even requiring) roman catholics to attend to an anglican mass when they can't find a catholic parish near enough. The core beliefs being compatible, there's no sin in doing so while missing the holy mass would be a bigger offense. Modern, european catholicism is in fact getting back in the line of the original rules of the primitive Church, to the great displeasure of the Holy See who only paid lip service for a thousand years to the respect of this principle of individual freedom of thought.
But you're right when you say that most catholics are being hypocriticals. Raised a catholic, I have been tempted for some times to describe myself as a 'believer from the steps', ie, paying reverence to the holy scriptures only and discarding all the cruft piled up upon them following Paul's epistles. I finally came to the conclusion that while all this crap can't be proven neither right nor wrong, I had no time to bother in this terrestrial life for what could really be fairy tales. To me, it's far more important to live a nice life and be good to others, not because there's a reward after death, but simply because it's a reachable aim to contribute, however slightly, to mankind welfare. Moreover, if there's something out there, being good for the sake of it can't do me any harm afterward. And if there's nothing, well, loved ones will have something kind to remember, and stories to pass on, and that would be the closest to eternity somone can expect.
I thought so at first too, but after a second reading, the punctuation has no sense in the context, and wouldn't have been used in a XVIIIth century book professionnaly typesetted. I side with the pun interpretation on this one. While punctuation has been more laxed in earlier centuries, proper usage was setteled and to break the line a coma or a semicolumn would have been used. ':' means 'therefore' in french (and probably in english too), it's never used as a pause or silence.
Got a complete classic lineup of those, from 8088 XT to pentium 166, through AT, 286, 386 PS/2, 486 tower server, a couple of thinkpads, etc.
All extremely well built in my opinion, perhaps the PS/2s are a bit more frail, but the AT, oh, the AT... Case made with leftover of Abrhams M1 armor plates, disk platters moving the desk while spinning up...
Well you where very lucky to have a 68k back then. CP/M 68k was a rare beast.
Thank to a storm, a lightning stroke the building where my father had his accountancy office. This created a power surge that melt down every appliances connected to the mains. But my soon-to-be-own computer had a magical device built into its PSU : a fuse. The insurance covered everything, my father told me I could peek a look at what might be put back in working order and keep it. I changed the melted fuse and the computer was (still is by the way) mine.
Since then I never bought a new computer for myself. I look for them in trashes or dumpsters and bring them back to life again. I prefer by a long shot heavy duty machines, dilapidated shop workhorses and everything where iron and unix has a part to play over fancy multimedia centers and "playstations". As this uncommon occupation gave me some local popularity, I'm sometime given old computers before they're send to china for recycling. Got an alpha this way. I bought a couple of Sun (sparc and ultra) 2nd hand, though. Couldn't resist the urge.
Ummm Wordstar which was the wordprocessor for cp/m hit 1.0 in 1978.
That's true for 8080 and 8086 versions of CP/M, not for the CP/M 68K I was using. It would have needed a rewrite in C to work. Factor this plus the fact that I was in high school (as in living on parental grant) and that I needed a french version (with pesky letters like é à ç ê...), you insensitive lucky boy.
Just by digging google, I found this, and as it seems, at the time I was really out of luck. Alright, my words were a bit exagerated, but I vividly remember feeling really compelled to write the bloody thing myself.
There was indeed the first french wordprocessor out, called textor if memory serves, but I don't think it was ported to my machine, and basicaly I was stuck with ED, the perfect editor, before I took matters into my own, 12 yo hands. I can't claim it was a world class success, but man, was I proud when my first pages got out of the printer !
Just something else I should have written in my answer. You're posing as the perfect student, which is true I hope;-)
But as a lecturer, I know that statistically, students want badly rote memorization. Because they know there's going to be a test at the end of the semester, and all of a sudden, when the time comes, they realize that being tested on their critical abilities is more dangerous than memory. Memory is a muscle, anybody can train to have an adequate one. But critical thinking is MUCH more difficult to achieve, and they realize they'd rather let me do the job first hand. That's how I'm always feeling in the process of potty training talking parrots most of the time (and even, I realize ALEX certainly had more gusto for thinking than the majority of my students).
But now, with so much information literally at my fingertips, I see no reason to fill as much of my memory up with the rote knowledge and facts. I feel that I am better served by learning the art of skepticism, philosophy, conceptualization, and the general techniques used to analyze, logically, the goings-on in my daily life.
It would be marvelous given an inifinte amount of free time on your hands, but face it : most parts of human knowledge are now so complex that even the basics can take years to just grasp. You can't possibly discover again what's already been done all the way up, so you've got at least to learn about where the current knowledge has arrived. And this can only be done via rote learning.
I too would be delighted to be able to simply crash into any science or art by just looking for answers, but I've exeperienced that you must learn how to "read the map" before being able to make a move. And learning that map is very time consumming, boring, and solely based on memorization.
Having spent a lot of time in the education system, both in front and behind the desk, I have mixed feelings about all this IT craze. When I was a pupil back in the 80's, I had to brew my own text processor (cp/m computer, wordprocessor still to be invented...). Wonderful experience, I typed back home my (terrible) handwritten notes. I still don't think it helped me a bit learning my lessons, but it taught me about computers when it was still quite new and shinny. Coolness factor at the time, about zero. Being a nerd wasn't hype then.
Reel forward : 20 years later, I'm teaching criminal law. Still a nerd, but mainly as a hobbyist. Still produce most of my work on computers, likes wikipedia (but know it's not a source of scholarly value), use fluently most parts of internet. Students in front of me are wired as much as they can lift. After letting them do as they please (we're at university, they should be grown up, FFS), I have to step in and forbid recording devices in my class room, read the riot act (throwing the lowest possible marks as if shot in burst with a M16) at those stupid enough to forget I too can google parts of their dissertation to find the true author, etc. Now, I don't even provide a powerpoint during the course, they f*ckin' have to listen to me and write things down with a pencil. If they don't like that, my door is always open and works both ways.
Finally, my feeling is IT is very good for homework, library work, and anything research-related. But it's the worst ennemy of the student willing to truly learn. I know many will swear that it's helping them, but that's self delusion. I too had a friend before internet who used to swear sticking colored stars next to chapters heads was helping him. It failed. he should have read the actual contents instead of fuzzing around. So have done successful students for past centuries, so will they for centuries to come.
Nothing replace hard personnal work. But there is still a place for IT : it's a considerable step forward for anonymity of dissertations, and it avoids students having low marks for the sole reason the teacher can't decipher them because they have a bad writing.
Almost nobody, anywhere, ever had a CP/M Manual. I don't doubt it is slightly possible you had one, but it's not likely.
Well, count me in the lucky fews. I still have my own original, Sord comp. co. branded, DRI copyrighted, CP/M 68K manuals, both user's and programmer's parts. It is in a nice, white binder. Oh, and in the binder there is a complete C reference too, k&r compatible [cp/m 68K was much more advanced than x80/86 versions, obviously lurking toward unix. As they put it, C was only missing a few unusual calls like fork():-)].
You obviously are one yourself, for I clearly remember the page in my CP/M manual urging to and explaining how to actually duplicate the full system and utility disks from the originals as soon as possible, just in case. Going as far as suggesting to make more than one copy.
I remember my first computer was a M68 ; I still have it, and it works well. I loved SGL, it was so sleek at the time to describe graphics in actual words instead of peeking and poking at vram. You are a lucky person to have worked for such a brilliant company. I was too young at the time.
Slashdot Mirror
Me too. Of course, there's no time bomb. Many documents are fine. But I have also seen many already badly deteriorated. The thing is you can't make an accurate prediction at the time of printing. And as far as archival goes, you can't predict what will be needed in the future (that's the purpose of archiving). So basically, you're making a bet, and that's not good.
Dot matrix impact printed documents should last a good long time as well.Funnily enough, I had to go through a heap of pyjama-striped paper not long ago. I'm not that confident anymore. I noticed the ink had turned very pale, and some pages were barely readable.
...unless you do it professionnaly on acid and bleach free paper, with real ink. Laser toner won't stick to paper for more than 10 ~ 15 years, after that it begings to turn back to powder. Thermal (old fax) paper is worse, inkjet printers are marginaly better but don't expect anything to last over 30 years with home and office printing technologies.
I won't speak in the name of others, but clearly The Gimp is not a competitor to photoshop. If PS was to be competing against The Gimp, Adobe would have to release native file format information, plus access to the code. For those among FOSS supporters like me, failing on both counts is a total show stopper for even considering a switch, much like the burden of your previous work is to you.
The Gimp is like the plank cabin you build on your grounds : there might be holes, it might not be completely comfortable, and the roof might even leak, but nevertheless, you're the king in your own private kingdom, because you're considered to be the owner of the place. PS is more like a rented flat : nice view, good furnitures, central heating, but if your landlord happens to be a complete moron, and suddenly decides to lock all the doors at 9 pm, you're fscked, and either you're in by the curfew, or you're homeless for the night.
You decide what's acceptable to you.
mod informative UP !
You're the little boy shouting 'the empror has no clothes'
What a relief to learn at last that I wasn't alone to see weird coloured fringes around black letters
While I concur, that's easily explained by the Stockholm syndrom. Let's get back in time ; MS-DOS 1.0 through 3.1 were complete POS. DOS 3.2 was finally apt enough right at the time DRI ultimately bit the bullet, leaving MS the only game in town for professionnal OS. Subsequent versions of DOS were POS too, but under pressure from the gaming industry, bridged the gap to bring the PC world alive out of the amigatari era ; finally, DOS 6.2 ran correctly enough when the home gaming industry parted with non-PC manufacturers. Provided you had 7 or more config.sys sections to launch everything you wished (lim-ems or xms, everyone ? Dos UMB or not ?)
We can draw the same timeline for windows. Win 1, 286, 386, 3.0, were complete failures ; not until 3.1 was windows barely tolerable, provided you add wing32 and a couple of things. In the 'NT' line, things were about the same until NT4. Then came 95 and 2K that weren't big hits but stabilised enough for day to day use after shitloads of service packs, the last one being win 98sp2 for 95. Let's count Me as a market testbed for some user features due to enter XP. Finally, comes XP, stable enough after 7 years of serious consumer abuse.
And now, Vista. So let me look at my crystal ball : in about a 5~7 years time frame, after countless SPs, bugs, consumer trampling over and smothering, Vista will be EOLed, and we will gather again to mourn the gone OS while bashing the new Redmond's bloatware.
Well, I won't be playing that silly game, because I left the boat around 1996 for a slackware 3 and never felt compelled to look back.
Having been both defiant and cocky for a long time as a student, because many teachers I had were plain idiots, I surprisingly never had to give a single detention when in turn I steped behind the desk. Know why ? Because I never felt threatened in my teacherhood by a defiant and cocky student. Moreover, I felt it was my duty to listen to his/her objections, and thought that there was a certain possibility that he/she might be right. That's what I call teaching - accepting constructive criticism, elaborating talks, and drawing conclusions. What you're talking about is herding. Completely different job.
Gimli Glider.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Fuel_exhaustion_on_commercial_airliners
The problematic part is that flash won't run on anything but an Intel-compatible processor, and the "proprietary" nature of flash makes sure that no-one else can adapt flash for another kind of machine. Not everybody have or wish to use an intel PC, as ubiquitous as it may be.
... I thought the DEC-10 panel was a plain pdp/11 ? Where's the point ?
You're forgetting that at the root of catholicism, there is the freedom of thought. Ask the first catholic priest about it, and he'll certainly agree. Grudgingly, but agree nonetheless. That means that if you believe contraception is not a sin, you do as you please, you don't have to confess it, and you take the risk of being proven right or wrong on judgement day. Being catholic is only believing in the credo (there is one trinity, father, son, and holy spirit, and they are all the essence of God, basically). You're not even required to pay any reverence to the Pope. That's the reason why a priest who breaks his vows and marry a woman remains a priest. He's kicked out of the 'administrative' part of the Church, can't have a parish or publicly serve the mass, but all the sacraments he hold are nonetheless valid, and while catholics are advised to avoid attending such sacraments, there's nothing to nullify them once received. It goes as far as permitting (and even requiring) roman catholics to attend to an anglican mass when they can't find a catholic parish near enough. The core beliefs being compatible, there's no sin in doing so while missing the holy mass would be a bigger offense. Modern, european catholicism is in fact getting back in the line of the original rules of the primitive Church, to the great displeasure of the Holy See who only paid lip service for a thousand years to the respect of this principle of individual freedom of thought.
But you're right when you say that most catholics are being hypocriticals. Raised a catholic, I have been tempted for some times to describe myself as a 'believer from the steps', ie, paying reverence to the holy scriptures only and discarding all the cruft piled up upon them following Paul's epistles. I finally came to the conclusion that while all this crap can't be proven neither right nor wrong, I had no time to bother in this terrestrial life for what could really be fairy tales. To me, it's far more important to live a nice life and be good to others, not because there's a reward after death, but simply because it's a reachable aim to contribute, however slightly, to mankind welfare. Moreover, if there's something out there, being good for the sake of it can't do me any harm afterward. And if there's nothing, well, loved ones will have something kind to remember, and stories to pass on, and that would be the closest to eternity somone can expect.
I thought so at first too, but after a second reading, the punctuation has no sense in the context, and wouldn't have been used in a XVIIIth century book professionnaly typesetted. I side with the pun interpretation on this one. While punctuation has been more laxed in earlier centuries, proper usage was setteled and to break the line a coma or a semicolumn would have been used. ':' means 'therefore' in french (and probably in english too), it's never used as a pause or silence.
Got a complete classic lineup of those, from 8088 XT to pentium 166, through AT, 286, 386 PS/2, 486 tower server, a couple of thinkpads, etc.
All extremely well built in my opinion, perhaps the PS/2s are a bit more frail, but the AT, oh, the AT... Case made with leftover of Abrhams M1 armor plates, disk platters moving the desk while spinning up...
Thank to a storm, a lightning stroke the building where my father had his accountancy office. This created a power surge that melt down every appliances connected to the mains. But my soon-to-be-own computer had a magical device built into its PSU : a fuse. The insurance covered everything, my father told me I could peek a look at what might be put back in working order and keep it. I changed the melted fuse and the computer was (still is by the way) mine.
Since then I never bought a new computer for myself. I look for them in trashes or dumpsters and bring them back to life again. I prefer by a long shot heavy duty machines, dilapidated shop workhorses and everything where iron and unix has a part to play over fancy multimedia centers and "playstations". As this uncommon occupation gave me some local popularity, I'm sometime given old computers before they're send to china for recycling. Got an alpha this way. I bought a couple of Sun (sparc and ultra) 2nd hand, though. Couldn't resist the urge.
That's true for 8080 and 8086 versions of CP/M, not for the CP/M 68K I was using. It would have needed a rewrite in C to work. Factor this plus the fact that I was in high school (as in living on parental grant) and that I needed a french version (with pesky letters like é à ç ê ...), you insensitive lucky boy.
Just by digging google, I found this, and as it seems, at the time I was really out of luck. Alright, my words were a bit exagerated, but I vividly remember feeling really compelled to write the bloody thing myself.
There was indeed the first french wordprocessor out, called textor if memory serves, but I don't think it was ported to my machine, and basicaly I was stuck with ED, the perfect editor, before I took matters into my own, 12 yo hands. I can't claim it was a world class success, but man, was I proud when my first pages got out of the printer !
Just something else I should have written in my answer. You're posing as the perfect student, which is true I hope ;-)
But as a lecturer, I know that statistically, students want badly rote memorization. Because they know there's going to be a test at the end of the semester, and all of a sudden, when the time comes, they realize that being tested on their critical abilities is more dangerous than memory. Memory is a muscle, anybody can train to have an adequate one. But critical thinking is MUCH more difficult to achieve, and they realize they'd rather let me do the job first hand. That's how I'm always feeling in the process of potty training talking parrots most of the time (and even, I realize ALEX certainly had more gusto for thinking than the majority of my students).
It would be marvelous given an inifinte amount of free time on your hands, but face it : most parts of human knowledge are now so complex that even the basics can take years to just grasp. You can't possibly discover again what's already been done all the way up, so you've got at least to learn about where the current knowledge has arrived. And this can only be done via rote learning.
I too would be delighted to be able to simply crash into any science or art by just looking for answers, but I've exeperienced that you must learn how to "read the map" before being able to make a move. And learning that map is very time consumming, boring, and solely based on memorization.
Having spent a lot of time in the education system, both in front and behind the desk, I have mixed feelings about all this IT craze. When I was a pupil back in the 80's, I had to brew my own text processor (cp/m computer, wordprocessor still to be invented...). Wonderful experience, I typed back home my (terrible) handwritten notes. I still don't think it helped me a bit learning my lessons, but it taught me about computers when it was still quite new and shinny. Coolness factor at the time, about zero. Being a nerd wasn't hype then.
Reel forward : 20 years later, I'm teaching criminal law. Still a nerd, but mainly as a hobbyist. Still produce most of my work on computers, likes wikipedia (but know it's not a source of scholarly value), use fluently most parts of internet. Students in front of me are wired as much as they can lift. After letting them do as they please (we're at university, they should be grown up, FFS), I have to step in and forbid recording devices in my class room, read the riot act (throwing the lowest possible marks as if shot in burst with a M16) at those stupid enough to forget I too can google parts of their dissertation to find the true author, etc. Now, I don't even provide a powerpoint during the course, they f*ckin' have to listen to me and write things down with a pencil. If they don't like that, my door is always open and works both ways.
Finally, my feeling is IT is very good for homework, library work, and anything research-related. But it's the worst ennemy of the student willing to truly learn. I know many will swear that it's helping them, but that's self delusion. I too had a friend before internet who used to swear sticking colored stars next to chapters heads was helping him. It failed. he should have read the actual contents instead of fuzzing around. So have done successful students for past centuries, so will they for centuries to come.
Nothing replace hard personnal work. But there is still a place for IT : it's a considerable step forward for anonymity of dissertations, and it avoids students having low marks for the sole reason the teacher can't decipher them because they have a bad writing.
http://techrepublic.com.com/5208-6230-0.html?forumID=102&threadID=220570&messageID=2223103
Technically, you're right. Office is not preloaded, it's loaded flat out. It just misses Office.main_window.show() or something like that.Well, count me in the lucky fews. I still have my own original, Sord comp. co. branded, DRI copyrighted, CP/M 68K manuals, both user's and programmer's parts. It is in a nice, white binder. Oh, and in the binder there is a complete C reference too, k&r compatible [cp/m 68K was much more advanced than x80/86 versions, obviously lurking toward unix. As they put it, C was only missing a few unusual calls like fork() :-)].
You obviously are one yourself, for I clearly remember the page in my CP/M manual urging to and explaining how to actually duplicate the full system and utility disks from the originals as soon as possible, just in case. Going as far as suggesting to make more than one copy.
I remember my first computer was a M68 ; I still have it, and it works well. I loved SGL, it was so sleek at the time to describe graphics in actual words instead of peeking and poking at vram. You are a lucky person to have worked for such a brilliant company. I was too young at the time.