artifacts that tell a story

[joshua0]

This year when I was home for Thanksgiving, my mom said that she dug up a box of floppy disks, and asked if I cared about them or whether she should throw them away. Obviously, I am a data hoarder, and I was going to archive them all, so in my suitcase they went. Today, I spent an hour or so stuffing them in a drive and imaging them -- and occasionally spot-checking their contents. I came across this one, assuming that it had a Thanksgiving menu from 1999.

Instead, it had an artifact that told a whole-ass story about me as a kid.

In the root directory, it had a handful of 640x480 JPEGs, PIC00001.JPG and so on, and an archive, PPM.ZIP. Inside the archive were some puzzling files:

  Length      Date    Time    Name
---------  ---------- -----   ----
   576043  1999-01-10 13:44   ABSCDP.PPM
   576018  1999-01-05 19:21   BSPENCHK.PPM
   576018  1999-01-05 19:39   GHLL.PPM
   576018  1999-01-05 19:17   KHMONO~1.PPM
   576018  1999-01-05 19:16   KNMIC.PPM
   576018  1999-01-05 19:37   SLCDS.PPM
   576018  1999-01-05 19:41   THANKS~1.PPM
   576018  1999-01-05 19:46   USARCHK.PPM
---------                     -------
  4608169                     8 files

I opened one of them, and found an image that instantly told an entire story, and I immediately understood the context of the rest of the floppy. Below is a representative sample, KNMIC.PPM.

Indeed, in the root of the floppy, PIC00004.JPG had exactly that: a 640x480 image of one young Joshua staring into a microscope.

We can infer a lot from the metadata. The date was January 5th, 1999, so presumably that would have been thank you cards for Chanukah presents from 1998 (Chanukah that year starting December 14th, 1998). I would have been 10 years old at the time.

The file type tells a lot, too. For some reason, the files are 400x480 8-bit PPM files. So from that, we can infer that I put them together on my hand-me-down Linux machine. I have a very strong imagination of how this probably worked. My guess is that, after dinner, my mom must have told me to "go write thank-you letters", to which I presumably said "Ok!". Then, my best guess is that I would have immediately busted open the install box for the just-then-released (November 1998) Red Hat Linux 5.2, and kicked off an upgrade of my PC from Red Hat 5.0, which I was running previously, and said: "but Mom, I can't do anything while my computer is upgrading!"

Eventually, it presumably finished, and she must have sat down next to me and said "okay, now you have to do it". My guess is that we both would have sat down, and then I would have stared blankly at the screen, and drawn some colored boxes, and I would have thrashed for an hour trying to find a nice thing to say about each gift, and sat there waiting for the words to come to me to say "thank you for the microscope". (All of the .ppms in that folder had the exact same wording, including a blank one to fill in.)

I assume that the major challenge was that I was, in fact, probably not thankful at all for the microscope in specific (though, although I didn't know it at the time, I presumably was at least a little thankful that people had thought of me to give me a gift at all). It must have been an absolute war to get me to do that kind of task; looking at the timestamps, it looks like it took me about half an hour to write seven identical letters. And looking at the timestamps for the photographs, apparently it would be another five days before we could sit me down to actually take the photos.

It is amazing how much you can pick up from just looking at the surrounding bits of context of bits from the past. God, I was an all-out nightmare of a child.

You know, it probably should not have been a surprise when I was picked up an ADHD diagnosis at the age of 34.

Comments

[bblum]

:)

[gregh1983]

Fun story -- both the historical artifacts and the modern reflections :-) Now I'm thinking about those old digital cameras that saved photos onto floppy disks. We had two of them in my high-school photography class during this same year, 1998-99.