About the Letters

About the Letters archive, for the first time since the 1990s, I've been able to open my old files that date back to the original Microsoft Works 1 days when I had an Apple IIc and real 5" floppy disks.

By chance, a friend, Piet Bess, gave me an old Mac hard drive, with Microsoft Works 4 on it—but more importantly, with a converter file.

Some of the files opened to blank docs, if at all. I have lost my letters to Michael Fulton, for example. Just a blank page. I'm devastated. He's now a rather famous engineer. Same with Don Merideth's letters. Maybe they'll resurface in someone's literary estate.

With the converter, Microsoft Works, 4 in OS 9, and Text Edit in OS X, I was able to save most of the files. But many files still open with a lot of garbled text and the alphabet carriage return embedded in them. Suffice to say, a lot of clean-up hours were invested.

I guess this massive missive effort was spurred on because Lion is due out soon—and if I don't rescue these files now with my old PPC iMac, I may not have an option when it fails—as I'm running OS 9 Classic and Tiger to bring these pieces into the 21st century a decade late.

As I was cleaning the letters up, it struck me that many of them stand alone as literary pieces, or fodder for a literary memoir—as they seem to be riddled with famous people—or people who later became famous. So, I've posted them, warts and all, for now. Don't know how much tinkering I'll do. I just wanted them all in one place where I could refer back to them. Mine them.

They're posted in no particular order, other than they span from circa 1988 to 2000—and are mostly squashed into the February 2007 slot for lack of a better home. I began the blog in January 2007, and so, can't post anything earlier than that.

Most notably the letters record the fall of the Soviet Union as I was there at the end.

Mea Culpea if I offend any the recipients of the epistlary process. That is not my intention. Summer Solstice, 2011.