Digital archaeology is one of my favorite blog post forms. An avid X user from 198X resurrects an old system that he or she had used to create something amazing/build a business/write a game/or generally hack around. The resulting material – photos, video, and commentary – are priceless.
Quinn Dunki has posted a truly amazing look inside her Apple IIc and a passel of disks she found in her mom’s basement. By taking apart her old floppy drive and then booting the IIgs using a number of modern and older tools she was able to resurrect, as she puts it, a “handful of magnetic bits survived 30 years in my mom’s basement, ready to come back and remind me how much I liked this game.”
The saddest thing is that nothing these days is engineered like they engineered 1980s hardware. Brass standoffs, hand-soldered connectors, and beautifully laid out, repairable boards made this hardware the the Colonial Furniture of the computer world: carefully wrought with an eye toward efficiency and beauty.
Check out this board:
Dunki wrote:
The best part? When Dunki finally boots the thing up and shows off some really nice 1986 vintage graphics. It’s like seeing an old friend after almost 30 years.