My office is holding its annual Christmas open house next week, which is essentially a big party where we ply our clients with booze and food and prizes until they can’t help but send contracts our way (or so we hope). In preparation, we did a little bit of spring cleaning, and judging by some of the artifacts we threw out, we’ve missed the last ten or so springs.

Among the hidden treasures: enormous hardcover developer guides for languages that are not only obsolete, but which nobody in the office actually remembers existing in the first place; hardware components of mysterious purpose and Soviet-era industrial aesthetics; an old PS/2 keyboard still in the original box, which rather optimistically advertised that, by merely using this keyboard, the user was a “stylish trendsetter”. Sure, it’s a grand claim for a $15 manual input device, but the thing has rounded arrow keys which form a jaunty oval pattern. Trendsetting indeed.

The most popular curiosity (aside from a hardcopy resume of a former employee known ironically as Captain Awesome) was a book, circa mid-to-late-nineties, which was a directory of web pages. Similar in size, paper quality, and layout to a phone book, it was an A-to-Z of the World Wide Web. In book form. Truly awe-inspiring, and almost, but not quite, as awesome as the Captain (who is Two Kinds of Awesome™).

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