From the New York Times:
DANA LUCIANO has moved three times in the past two years. Each time, Dr. Luciano, who is an assistant professor of English at Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y., has taken along boxes containing her old and obsolete computers.
Some of the machines are now stored in her basement, but others are scattered around her office, including an Apple PowerBook containing the only copy of some research she did on 19th-century mourning rituals.
For years, because of a hardware glitch, she has been unable to take the data off the computer. So she simply keeps the machine around, consulting it as she might a reference book whenever she needs to look at the material. "Some day," she said, sounding vaguely wistful, "I will get those files off that computer. Or something."
Dr. Luciano's partner, Jennifer Sturm, has added to the collection of boxes with her own old PC's. Ms. Sturm, a systems administrator for one of Hamilton's academic departments, said she had something of a sentimental attachment to the old machines. Also, she said, "you never know what you're going to need."
Ms. Sturm, 32, graduated from college 11 years ago, and all her papers are on 3 1/2-inch diskettes that she holds on to like so many LP's. "The disks are an integral part of what I move from place to place whenever I move," she said. Yet she no longer has a computer with a diskette drive. "That's a really bad situation," she acknowledged.
