I am excited this evening. I just found a CD that I burned back in 1996 or 1997 or so.

On this CD is some data I thought I had lost. It has copies of information on some floppies that can’t be read anymore.

But it also has the PowerPoint presentation I did as an 8th grader that got me to National History Day in Washington, DC. Not only that, but also the original high-resolution scans of the photos I used in that presentation. Some of these scans are of photos that date back to the early 1900s, whose owners may not be easily reachable today. I had been hoping to find this for years. I knew it was buried somewhere.

And YES — stumbled across it tonight.

I will be posting some photos on this blog in the coming days.

But first, I have to find a way to convert this ancient PowerPoint file to a format that OpenOffice can read — so I get the correct story behind each photo.

The scans were saved back in the days when a person got 8 characters to name a file. Not very descriptive.

(And I remember how much space it took up on the hard drive I had back then, and how much I wanted to just delete those big picture files. Glad I didn’t.)