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The clean/tidy/excavation continued unabated today.

Remember the days when the green cross code was embossed on your school pencils and you got safety information on the back of your jotters (all very wise and helpful words, I'm sure you'll agree)? My dad was a teacher. Every Christmas my sister and I had some wee extras in our stockings. Pencils, erasers, pencils, dictionaries, pencils and... jotters! Found a batch of these, circa 1980's (yes, this is how far back I hoard)!

The front room is mostly done. I can't believe how many empty boxes I kept over the years. Amazingly I have found shelf space for all my dvd's (well that is other than the 8 full stackable boxes)! Still have to find some space for a whole bunch of cd's and books. Gawd, I really need to put up some more shelving!

Today was the hardest part of the clear out to date. I went through my old pc games. I didn't do too badly, however, in spite of my hard line approach to most things, I just couldn't part with my beloved flight sim's. Still will probably never play them again but... Some of these go waaaaaaaay back. Way back to the days when you really had to know how your computer worked to be able to play games. Way back when you had a set of 3 1/4 inch start up floppy disks to set your pc up precisely to play that game. Geez, wasn't windows 3.1 and DOS great!!!

For most this can be skipped but for anyone who remembers those days, here's a walk down memory lane with the spec requirements for my first ever pc flight sim, the excellent Digital Integration Tornado from 1993.

System Requirements

Absolute minimum system:

- IBM PC or compatible
- DOS 5.0
- Hard drive (at least 7Mb spare)
- 80386 16MHz processor
- 1Mb RAM
- VGA (256k memory)
- Microsoft compatible mouse
- Approximately 600k (615,000 bytes) of free conventional memory

Just to emphasise the fragile nature of the software back in the day, the following note was included in the technical supplements (heh, yep, every game came with one of these).

Tornado will not run if you have any TSR (Terminate and Stay Resident) programs loaded into memory (e.g. DOS shells, printer spools etc.). Remove these from your AUTOEXEC.BAT file or make yourself a separate Tornado boot disk (see below). Tornado will not run within windows.

In other news, EOW would appear to have gone through at Dublin today so unless I'm really unlucky and the branch fails their EOD tomorrow, my final 24/7 has ended without incident. FREEDOM!!!

The clean up continues tomorrow. Happy days!