OT anal moment

This rings a bell here Roberta. I will do it soon..I will do it soon..I will do .......

Several years ago I had a horrible tangle of recipes in desperate need of sorting and organization, so I took all of them to the dining room table and made piles in the various catagories. Each catagory is now in its own labeled manilla file folder, and all of the folders are in a rather large accordion file that stands up on the shelf with the regular recipe books. I even made one folder of "to be sorted" as a catch-all, and occasionally sort them out for their proper files. It's not a perfect system, but it works very well for me, and now it's very easy to find those special old family recipes. I should really enter them all into the computer and print a "real" recipe book for me and send copies on disks to sisters and nieces, but there are so many other, more interesting things to do . . .

Speaking of recipes on computer.......... When my dad was "coping" with major health issues of various sorts he started typing recipes into the computer. This was many years ago, the computer was an Apple (not Mac) and the files are 5 1/2" floppies. He did thousands of recipes, organized by type and so on. The problem........ what to do with them? When he died we thought about a web site to post them all on, but didn't do it. Not even sure the files/disks can be read at this point. Anyone have any ideas? Should I just get the disks and dump them into the trash? Daddy did all this when he couldn't sleep, and knew that he couldn't concentrate long enough to do other things. It made him feel like he was doing something that might be useful. (He had several medical issues, including a sleep disorder that kept him from sleeping at all sometimes for days, then he would have to sleep, sometimes for days. He also was obviously loosing brain function in some ways.... he got to where he couldn't read a fiction book because he couldn't remember stuff long enough to finish the book. And he had been a school teacher.....he knew some of what was going on... it was difficult to watch. )

Anyway, if someone has ideas, please let me know.

Pati, > Several years ago I had a horrible tangle of recipes in desperate need

Pati, the problem won't so much be finding a drive for it (you can find USB

5.25 floppy drives on eBay for somewhere around $10) it will be figuring out the program that created it and finding another app that will read the files.

Here's current auctions for 5.25 floppy drives:

Do you have an idea of what proggie created the files? If the files are in a Rich Text Format you'll probably be able to open them in current apps ... if they're more specific than that (such as Word Perfect or Word files) they might be too old to be imported in ...

HTH!! Connie :)

They were done in whatever was on Apple SE (??) computers. These were the ones that were real popular in schools back in the '80s and '90s. I don't know if there is anything around that could read them these days. sigh.

Pati, > Pati, the problem won't so much be finding a drive for it (you can find USB

Well .... yes and no. If the files were created in a VERY basic word processing app (like TextEdit or NotePad - well, the equivalent of) then you could more than likely open it. Those apps don't really change ... the biggest hurdle would be the OS.

Like I said, eBay has some drives that'll read'em for $10 ... if you can get your hands on one your every day word pad app should be able to open them. It's a risk though, if he used Word Perfect or old Word. It could probably still be done, but it would be a bit of work.

I'd get the drive and take it to the nearest high school or college - somewhere there will be a kid who'd love to try it. It's a geek's dream! To be able to tell his buddies "Dude! Guess what I did?! I pulled the dat off a

5.25!!"

Really. My DD would do it for you. She's geekier than most 16 year old boys!!

Hugs!! Connie :)

BTW, in our house, "geek" is a compliment!! :)

Pati, if I were you, I'd explore the possibility of taking the disks to someplace like Kinko's and seeing if they could put the recipes onto CDs or DVDs. Then, if you have a recipe (or other) program that can read the files, you'd have a memento worth saving. The most popular recipe program from years ago on the Mac was MasterCook, and most current recipe programs will import files from that.

Personally, I keep most of my recipes in my computer (I now use something called MacGourmet -- it's terrific), since it makes it so much easier to find something. I never have to remember which book or file a specific recipe is in. :)

Sounds like my "special" cookbook shelf - unlike the normal cookbook shelf. The special one is where all those raggedy scribbled torn out pages go, along with the "use all the time" books. I think I'll follow your example.....this weekend.

Pati, the SE was a Mac -- I know, because I used to repair them, along with Apple II machines and various other Mac models. ;)

YIKES how long did that take? I keep looking at my cabinet thinking someday....

bought the Cook'n Recipe Organizer (for myself / from the kids) a while back and we are slowly putting in my scraps of paper and index card recipes. And the ones i had typed up in Pagemaker. I like it, but it is really slow going. So many other things to take presidence...

kellie

Then maybe it was an Apple II.... I will have to double check and see if Mom knows for sure..... If anyone wants to try, let me know and I can ship a few to see if anything can be done....

Pati, > >

He spent hours upon hours doing this. Thousands of recipes.... over 100 for chocolate brownies. No special program, as far as I know. Just entered them onto disks. Before that he did type some out on a typewriter.... I have some of those. These are all "formatted" to fit on a half sheet of paper, I think. Do have some printed out. Rick found the box of the print outs when he was cleaning while I was out of town. Mom found the box of disks when she was cleaning up ..... and can't throw them away because evidently Daddy said something about that being what she would do with them when he was gone. Sigh. She said that if nothing can be done with them someone else will have to pitch them.

Pati, > YIKES how long did that take? I keep looking at my cabinet thinking > someday....

Here's some pictures, if that helps:

Mac SE

IIe Scarily enough, I've owned both of these machines. (And the IIe wasn't even my first Apple. Yikes!)

Maybe you can find someone with a dual drive who can transfer them to

3" disks or to cds and then toss them.

L>He spent hours upon hours doing this. Thousands of recipes.... over 100

Linda PATCHogue, NY

Howdy!

Happy Birthday, Kathy! Reckon it doesn't matter that your actual b-day was yesterday; you are going to celebrate for at least a week, right? ;-D Do we send the old apples to you now or stick cloves in them and send for you Holiday décor?

Cheers! R/Sandy

If you can still read them somehow, copy them to CDs or an external drive. Gives you more time to decide! Roberta in D

"Pati C." schrieb im Newsbeitrag news:fihmdk$g8l$ snipped-for-privacy@aioe.org...

Took only about 3 hours, but I was pretty ruthless about tossing. Figured if I hadn't tried that casserole from 1985 by now, it wasn't going to happen! And I definitely wasn't going to ever make the cherry dessert with the spun sugar doodad perched on top :-) Time for a reality check!

Maybe someday I will feel inspired to put everything on computer. Of course, my computer is nowhere near my kitchen, so I'd have to print out any recipe I wanted to use anyway. Might just be better to leave them in the clipping notebook and cull them regularly! Roberta in D

"Kellie J Berger" schrieb im Newsbeitrag news:VNmdnSJGZJyZGNHanZ2dnUVZ snipped-for-privacy@comcast.com...

You and I are both old enough to remember when everyone was making granny dolls out of dried apples in the 1970's. I must have made hundreds of those things for church bazaars back then.

A nice quilty celebration last night at my favorite restaurant. A very good quilting buddy has a birthday 4 days before mine, so we always celebrate together sometime around our birthdays -- last night was the night that worked for us. She got a fabric and a small art quilt from me; I got lots and lots of fabric and chocolate from her. DH took the strong hints I'd been dropping, and bought me a Sacramento River Cats sweatshirt. (The local AAA baseball team, for those who are eavesdropping -

Dinner was fabulous -- sweet potato fries, ginger beer, and shrimp creole for me, DH had shrimp etouffee, and Sue had curried vegetables. We were all much too full for desert, but it sure was temping. :)

Oh, man, Patti. I had an old working SE and printer and finally trashed it not long ago. I guess it's true that as soon as you toss something, you figure out a use for it. I could have printed all your recipes out :-(

Sherry