Detritus of the Move - Changing Offices at WES

In mid-2004, the laboratory where I worked moved into a new building. I managed to be out of town during the move (that was good timing!), but upon return to Vicksburg, I wandered around the old building to see what was left. It was largely junk that no one wanted to take to their nice and clean new offices - debris that probably should have been dumped a long time before. My coworkers were scientists and engineers; we are the type of people who keep stuff - forever (just in case we might need it...).

9-track tapes used with older VAX-VMS computer systems. For decades. this is how you sent data to other scientists. You have seen tape reels like this in news articles of the Gemini and Apollo space missions. 

We still used these sturdy analogue telephones. The wheel on the right is a Kodak Carousel slide tray.

The manuals on the table are for Microstation software. In the 1990s, Microstation made you buy  proprietary workstations to run their software - at extortionist prices, of course.

A particle-board ersatz wood-grain computer station. Furniture at its best.

Good debris on another example of particle-board furniture. Definitely not worth moving.

That was a good Scotch tape dispenser!

Compared to the 9-track tapes, here we have "modern" data storage media: compact disks (CDs). The CD was originally developed as a music media to replace LP records, and a CD of about 640 mbytes could include the entire contents of Symphony 9 by Beethoven in uncompressed format.

More of the Microstation manuals and the proprietary Microstation keyboard. This software was used for bathymetry charts and analysis of sounding data. 

Trash is often interesting. Here we have Polaroid instant 35mm film and boxes of diskettes. 

Finally, a sad plant. "Take me with you!"

Photographs taken with a Leica M2 rangefinder camera on Kodak BW400 film. This was a black and white film that could be developed in C-41 chemistry, like any common color print film.