I spent part of this morning hunting through a dusty old box of floppy disks that were last used around the turn of the century, searching for a particular file that may or may not still exist. I need it for a project I’m working on but the problem is, I last saw this particular file when I submitted it as part of a GCSE Art and Design project; which dates it to 1997. That means the original file was stored on my Amstrad Mega-PC computer, a machine that has long since gone thanks to my mother wanting a clear-out of old things we apparently didn’t use any more. If the file in question is still in my possession, it has to be on one of these disks.
I think I may have found it. If I have, it’s in a self-extracting archive on a disk that is corrupted. I’m going to have to spend a lot of today working on that disk and hoping that the file can be recovered. So it’s partly good news, partly bad. What is good news (or at least interesting news from my perspective) is that I’ve also found something else that I had thought was long since deleted.
When was at university for the first time, I was part of a group called Durham University Treasure Trap. It’s a Live Action Role-playing society – the oldest and longest-running student LARP society in the world. It’s still around too, which is cool. I held various roles in this society over the time I was an active member and one of those roles was Website Coördinator.
The website hadn’t been overhauled for many years when I took it over and as a result, it needed a bit of a re-jig. I took a couple of days to make it work nicely on modern (for the time) browsers and also make it read better both when printed out (as the older version wasn’t all that great in that respect) and when read on a screen (which the current version of the site does not – some lessons are not well learned, sadly). The result was a clean, fast and lightweight website that also held copies of our latest newsletters (a simple task seeing as how I was also writing those at the time). I liked it; although I do recall a few people complaining about the colour scheme I chose for it. If I recall correctly, I did return it to a vellum-coloured site background eventually but I don’t have that version of the site here.
The site can be downloaded in its entirety from my Google Drive by clicking here, if you’re interested. I thought it was a fun glance back at the past. It’s only a few megabytes in size – large for the time (especially when we only had about 5Mb of allocated storage space on the web server at the time) but pretty tiny and easily portable by today’s standards.
Treasure Trap was a fun pastime for me back then; a way to hang out with good friends and have a lot of good fun. I’ve looked back on this old site with a lot of fondness while I was checking it over and if you remember Treasure Trap (or even if you’re still active in it today) you may get some enjoyment out of this, too.