This application sorts files on your desktop to a particular folder based on its age.
If the sound of a scheduled clean up made your face scrunch up, then why not program something to do the clean up instead!įor Windows there is a free but simple app that can help you with this called Desktop Cleanup. Schedule this as an recurring calendar appointment and you never know, seeing your whole desktop background might become a regular thing!
Plus the cleaner it is, the easier it’ll be to find the files that you do need!Ĭhoose how often you want to clean your desktop for example, every month and set aside a small amount of time to delete any files that you no longer need. It is after all, still over 27 years ago.Keeping a weekly appointment to review any loitering files on your desktop could be the key to maintaining a clean desktop. Civilization… except you can still see an inter-office memo envelope.
I have a modern, mouse-driven Sun Sparc workstation on my desk, networked to everybody else via Ethernet. It’s surprisingly modern: My 1990 office desk
I have another photo, of my desk in 1990 – just 6 years later. , I kept both the Gregorian calendar and the Tek Fiscal calendar on my desk wall so I could translate between the two so I didn’t accidentally commit to a major milestone that turned out to be Thanksgiving weekend. I worked for years at Tek before I found someone who could explain the rules around when that leap-week, as it was called, was inserted. It looks like it’s between October 5 and October 8.įor those of you familiar with fiscal calendars, you might enjoy seeing a little of what Tektronix’ fiscal calendar looked like in 1984: Tek fiscal calendar 500Īt that time, Tek’s calendar was very odd: 13 months of 4 weeks each, with a 5-week first month about once every 6 years to keep it from drifting away from the Gregorian calendar. Just in case you didn’t believe, you can see the October 1984 calendar on the bulletin-board wall. One thing that hasn’t changed much is office birthday celebrations: these pink lawn flamingos would be at home in any modern office. I don’t remember what I was using mag tape for in 1984, but there they are. If you look closely in the upper-left shelf, you can see three magnetic tape reels.
Every few years I need to remind myself that one big pitch for the Mac was that you could write memos without a typing pool (!) – at least we didn’t have a typing pool. Inter-Office Memo envelopesĪlthough we had engineer-to-engineer email as early as 1982, most official communications happened through inter-office paper mail, just as office workers had for ages. We didn’t have sophisticated spell checkers (and I still cared about spelling correctly) back then, so the book I kept closest to me was a simple spelling dictionary, that showed correct spelling and hyphenation for most words. C was such a cool language, compared to the Pascal and Assembly Language I’d been using a little earlier. Yup, that’s “ The C Programming Language“, published 6 years earlier. One thing hasn’t changed: having a reference book at hand for the latest programming language.
the serial connector to the terminal Cable-tied serial cable going directly to a port on the mainframe If you look closely, you can see the serial cable connected to the terminal, and you can see it running up to the ceiling… held by cable ties. I vaguely recall using Vi on this terminal as a really-cool editor, because you could see what you were editing – in contrast to line-oriented editors, which were like having a one-line window into your file. It’s an Ann Arbor Smart Terminal, connected via a serial cable to a Dec Vax time-sharing mainframe. If you squint, it looks something like a desk today, but being part of the last century, it has some important differences. If additional cleaning is required, slightly dampen the cloth with water or a cleaner intended for use with a screen or display, then wipe the screen. Use the cloth that came with the displayor another soft, dry, lint-free clothto wipe any dust from the screen. On a whim, I took a picture of my office desk. If cleaning an iMac screen, disconnect the power from your computer. I’ve been working at Tektronix in Beaverton, Oregon for 6 years. The original Mac was announced in January. But in looking up evidence I had of Tektronix having Ethernet (and Internet connectivity before that), I found a photo of my olde timey Tektronix office desk, and couldn’t resist cataloging how office computing has changed. I try not to spend much time talking about ye olde timey computing that I lived through, because it quickly becomes boring to all but those who were there, and the future is so much more exciting.