I had a moment of panic as a spreadsheet transferred over from my old to my new laptop failed to open, the computer saying that no programme existed. The panic was mixed with confusion, since other spreadsheets had opened perfectly well. I went and presented the problem to the Systems Administrator, then after a few minutes watching what the SA was doing while he muttered and clicked buttons realised that the puzzle might be easier to solve without me sitting there exuding anxiety at every pore.
The root of the problem was that the old laptop had been running on Excel 1997-2003. That is quite old, 1997 is getting on for twenty years ago. It couldn't have been the latest version of Excel when the SA originally installed it, but I suppose it was what we had a licence for at the time and was not so ludicrously old when the old laptop was new. The answer turned out to be that while I couldn't open the affected spreadsheets via the file manager, I could get into them if I opened Excel first. The SA advised me to stop running anything in compatibility mode and start saving them all in the current version.
It's quite sobering how quickly digital storage technologies go out of date. When I got my first computer it was back in the days of floppy discs, and then my second computer didn't have a floppy disc drive, and I bought a plug in one. I have no idea whether that is compatible with my latest laptop, but if it isn't then anything I've still got on floppy is lost to me. It's enough to make one appreciate the value of writing important things down on vellum, even now, a medium requiring no other device to read it, which if kept dry and protected from rats will still be perfectly legible a thousand years hence just stored in normal atmospheric conditions. One of the details I like about Margaret Attwood's The Handmaid's Tale is her conceit of the story being a narrative uncovered by future historians, who are unable to read it for some time until they have found or built a suitable reader for the storage device.
Spurred on by the panic over the spreadsheets, and the fact that I have just bought a pack of cheap USB sticks on Amazon, I enlisted the SA's help and finally switched on the even older computer, the desktop that was superseded by the old laptop and has been sitting gathering dust on my desk ever since. I stripped all the documents I needed out of it when I got the old laptop, but not the photos, such as they are. It had lost its keyboard in the intervening years, and the SA had to lend me one, and fish out a mouse, but to our joint amazement it started up with no protest, apart from some whinging that its Kapersky subscription had lapsed. The SA had thought it might be freaked out by the mighty capacity of the cheap USB sticks, but I was able to download the photos with no hitches at all. The SA even managed to salvage my old screensaver, a photograph of the hollow interior of an oak tree that I'm rather fond of, and will be replacing Microsoft's tacky barley field with a young woman walking through it just as soon as the SA can remember how to do screensavers on my new machine.
The old desktop will be off to the dump the next time I'm going that way. For form's sake the SA had better remove the hard drive first, though really if anybody can be bothered to reconstruct my decade old tax returns from it they're welcome to them, likewise if they want to look at some pictures of the garden and a now deceased cat that's fine by me.
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