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Monday, January 11, 2021

Were did seventeen years go...

I was clearing out my chest of drawers this weekend, and I found this. A plastic case to hold 3.5 inch floppy discs for reports. Back in the old days, we would type our reports out on one computer (usually, a laptop we would have to check out each day), save them to floppy, then download them on another computer at the station. And that was considered high-tech for the time. 

Shouldn't say much. In 1992, when I entered my reserve unit in New Orleans, we had Wang computers with 8 inch floppy drives. For basic word-processing, they weren't bad. 

These days most agencies have laptops (and moving to tablets and smart phone as a base) where you enter and transmit from the same unit, or access a Cloud based report system. This is back when we still had to present a receipt to our sergeant at end of shift (movement to paperless), but we still have paper accident reports to complete. 

I'm tempted to keep this, but I'd better destroy these. There is some sensitive information on it (names, addresses, Social Security numbers, etc), and although someone would not be able to easily access this, I don't need it. Purging old data is something we need to start doing, and that is one of my goals for 2021.

Have a great week.



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