What to do with old developer magazines

January 12, 2008

I've been in a very nostalgic mood lately. Listening to a lot of older music (Husker Du, old Slayer, old Green Day, Tom Waits...I even saw Doug E Fresh in concert on Thursday night), reading a ton about Apple II computers (and semi-considering buying an older box, maybe a Mac LC w/ the IIe card, or finding a 486 so I can play some of these 5.25" game discs that I still have laying around). Maybe I'm about to have a mid-life crisis! :) Last week I cleaned some stuff out of my grandfather's tool shed storage unit, which included a big box of older programming magazines -- issues of Dr Dobbs, C++ Journal, Game Developer Magazine, and so on. Mostly these were from '98 or '99; while a ton of the content is obsolete now, I did find the occasional article that still holds some weight (i.e. things related to pure C++ language features, algorithms, etc). I'm thinking of tearing out the still relevant articles and putting them in a binder for later reference (the pack rat in me just can't throw things out!). However I'm also curious what other folks are doing. Do you just chuck old dev mags after a certain time period? Scan the articles and dump them into SQL? Build a shrine to your previous coding efforts? :) Please contribute any ideas you have, even if it's just to tell me I'm too much of a pack rat. :) --n