Over the past couple of weeks my husband has been nagging me to go through our daughter’s old room & see what could be tossed out and/or kept. This of course accelerated in importance when I scheduled to have the carpets cleaned in the house and I needed to start the task of reviewing, tossing & reliving my past. Here’s what I’ve found:

• old photos (youth, college, family & some stuff I don’t even remember. Some of the photos will be scanned so I don’t loose my youth.)
• my baby book. (I will admit that I teared up when reading some of the comments my parents wrote about me. I even found a lock of my baby hair, my first tooth & an article that was written up about me when I took my mom’s old snow sled & ran it into a telephone pole when I was 8yrs old!)
• my daughter’s photo albums (those are getting shipped to her)
• old clip art magazines (don’t need those now as I do most of the searching online)
• old software (yup – some stuff goes back to version 1 of the stuff we use!)
• books that I haven’t read, college books, and business books
• books that were my daughter’s (I’ll keep those). One of the books was one of my favorites from when I was a little girl, “Harry the Dirty Dog”… oh – that book still delights me!
• my craft books, instructional books, high school & college yearbooks
• and two things that are definitely reliving the past…. 

One is a magazine article I wrote in 1994 about forecasting the future of graphic design/computers & stock photography. And the other is a compendium of stories & photos as told from attendees of the 2001 CorelWorld conference in Boston, MA about their experiences during 9/11 terroist attacks (I wanted to publish the 9/11 stories on the 10th anniversary – but I couldn’t find them in all dust & mess… but, I have them now!). So – for your enjoyment & giggles, here is the magazine article I wrote “way back when”:

Can’t Macs and PCS get along?

The World Bank has a very specific set of needs, designing inhouse publications, books, borchures, and business graphics and presentations. We’ve been fully computerized for over 5 years, which means we’re pretty deeply in; I’ve been experimenting with light and image in representing abstract concepts, and it’s fascinating!

Breakthroughs in the next year? Graphic software will become more flexible, easier to use—which means, of course, that all non-artists will find it even easier to do their worst, and we’ll have to turn into design polic. But a whle new world should open up with stock photography on the CD-Rom format. And the cost of color printers will fall and the quality go up.

But the head of my own personal wish list is for Macs and PCs to be totally compatible. And it’s not just pie-in-the-sky, I think it’s an absolute necessity. And then the sky is the limit.

—Kathy Rosen (yup that’s me), Graphic Design/USA, Feb. 1994