The digitization project here at Casa Sconita is almost complete. But The Spartan Woman remembered one thing she wanted rescued: the incomplete manuscript of a kid’s book. Problem is, said manuscript was on an ancient Apple Powerbook from 1998. No one ever backed it up to the cloud. Back then, clouds were just those puffy things in the sky,

[Image up top: Boxes and boxes of photos either scanned or about to be scanned.]

So yesterday we pulled the ancient beast out of its carrying case. Krikey, the thing is heavy. And….it booted up! Only problem was that the screen showed lots of horizontal lines, and the problem got worse when I found the file’s icon on the desktop. Was it lost forever? Repeated bootings got no better.

In frustration, I smacked the screen. Problem solved! The screen looked normal, and I called up the manuscript. I couldn’t connect to our ‘net, but the manuscript was short. I went into power typing mode and within a few minutes, I had a copy on my newish MacBook.

Check out the differences that 25 years made to laptops. Keep in mind that the 1998 model was pretty sleek for its time. The model on the right is the current M2 MacBook Air.