As someone older than 33, seeing “preserves” and “and it still works!” hits in a way I was not expecting to get hit this morning
Also you’re fat.
More exciting to me than finding one of Hemmingway’s typewriters! Ah, imagine if like the original id software NeXTSTEP machines had been preserved? Or the devkits used to make NES classics? What a treat, to boot up and look through the scattered virtual desk of one of the founders!
There may be a museum of VM images copying their system, programs and files, so you can just put them on and see what person X saw before compiling the version they shipped, see their last edits etc. I bet, comparing Carmac’s and Romero’s systems circa Doom can be a joy for at least a couple of nights.
now now now
My mind fluctuates towards having their emails too, like we have from poets and politicians of the past, and building a narrative, or even a game collected entirely in diving into a dump of their relationships and file history. A captivating idea I’d never materialize, so if some indie dev reads that - no demands, just steal that.
Hmm, an intriguing idea, an adventure game but you have to use a fantasy version of git or svn to mine through old source code repos looking for erased clues, abandoned forks, and other hints of The Truth hiding in the code. Using file diffs to compare versions of a .finger file found on two different VMs where some significant detail has changed (a file hash or a phone number or something).
Could be good in several genres too. Secret romance in the all queer dev team, lovecraftian digital dieties hiding in the archives, counter-espionage trying to locate a critical secret under time pressure, etc
Or a sim\party-rpg\dungeon-crawler where you as a lead try to find a middle of enabling each person’s passion, and either distancing them or overvaluing them makes the final product unbalanced and faulty. Like Daikatana.
In a 2019 Ars Technica documentary video, Meier said he’d saved two of the Compaq Deskpro 386 computers, but one of them exploded when he tried to boot it up due to the dust in the power supply.
Lol that sucks. “Hey look guys! I found my old PC, let’s power it on” BOOM “Well… shit.”
Right, dust + air + spark = dust bomb.
