The other day I was going through some boxes and getting rid of stuff I no longer use or need. I came across a container full of my old tech equipment: extra guitar cables, phone chargers, two cassette recorders, etc. The coolest things I came across were my computer discs and CD-R’s. I laughed because those items reminded me of how far we’ve come as a society and how far I’ve come as a person. The discs were from way back in 2009 and 2010, when I first published Fortune‘s Wing and Valentine. I used them to save my manuscripts and artwork for the covers and I sent copies to Xlibris, the first print-on-demand publisher I used.

I can remember saving my work on these things! Shoving those disks into the big clunky CPU that sat beneath my desk and clicking on “save” made me feel so accomplished. Burning stuff to those CDs? Pure joy. Being able to hold a disk and say, “This contains something I created!!!” felt so good. Those were the good old days.

It’s amazing how much technology has changed. I remember using floppy disks. I remember using the smaller disks above. I remember CD-R discs. Then came the flash drive. I still use mine. Now I don’t need a physical piece of equipment to save my manuscripts. Everything I have is in my Google Docs. Of course, I’m an older millennial, so I still keep back-ups on my flash drives. I’m part of the generation that graduated in the same year as Y2K, after all.

If you still have an old piece of tech you still use, I’d love to hear about it. Feel free to drop a comment below. 🙂