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By Jerry Finkelstein

What do you do with your old PC magazines? I save mine. I also save my old Time magazines, Newsweek, The New Yorker, National Geographic. Does anybody throw out the National Geographic? The magazines are in stacks and they’re not organized. It would take awhile to find one that I want. Different magazines tend to get into a particular pile without reason (they happen to land there) and there are piles here in the den, stacks in the kitchen, more in the garage and in the foyer where you enter the house. Of course they’re on the coffee table, they’re everywhere. But hey, it’s a big house.

I’m a collector. Who knows when I might want to look up an article about the latest copyright laws, or a review of recommendations for internal and external storage systems since 1989, or compare the National Geographic maps of the Silicon Valley with those of the home of Intell in Arizona. Of course I can get all of this on the Net, all these magazines are online with a more varied product and packed with information
in interesting and eye-grabbing layout. But I love paper. I need the book, the magazine
I can hold in my hand. I need reading the printed word, turning the pages.

Sometimes when I think I’m through with a particular magazine, I’ll bring it to our Tuesday PC meeting to be picked up by....whoever. Most of them are snapped up. That’s nice, they’ve found a new home. The few that are left behind are usually those that are a few years old. Oh well. I bring them back home and into the pile they go. Any pile. The stacks and stacks of magazines, after all, know no catalogue, there’s no order, certainly there’s no concern re date.

Wednesday is garbage day in my home area. I recycle. So, to throw out any of my magazines I tie them into a bundle, separate them from the rest of my garbage. Am I ready for this? The garbage truck comes around 7:00 in the morning. No problem.
I’ve got all night to decide.

JF

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