Most people put aside some scrap documents from their life for later, to retrace the past. In some cases this generates huge collections, but more often what remains over the years fits in a shoebox. Before, these bits and pieces were mostly paper based documents: letters, photographs, cards, diplomas, flyers, announcements and the like. On occasion one would spread out the content of such a box on a table to skim through one's past with hands and eyes. With the advent of non paper based information carriers also the ear is invited to help remembering and the eye may join in as tape recorder, film- and video camera proliferate. The usual reliving of events in the mind triggered by incidental single snapshots is altered by this new ability to replay time sequences. Not only is there less to imagine, also access to such documents is less direct. Codified information storage, be it analogue or digital, needs standardized equipment both for production and reproduction. Not only will skimming through one's past become a more cumbersome exercise, also, today's standards tend to be 'out of date' tomorrow. We may have a hard time to gather and assemble several generations of equipment to browse through our life documents. Are there solutions? Will the 'digital wonder box', the computer, replace the shoe box altogether? Or, could the two memory systems, the tangible shoebox and the dematerialized digital box, be combined?