Retro collectors are uncovering hoards of old data (opens in new tab)

A few month ago i took a machine from a scrapyard. That machine fell into my eye because its PSU had a female C13 socket in addition to the male C14 one, which i took as indication for an AT (not ATX) machine.

It turned out to be a pentium with ISA ports. I cleaned it, upon booting, i noticed the CMOS battery needed replacement. The CMOS was part of the dreaded Dallas 1287 RTC. Cutting it open and attaching another story, but i did it. Reading the required disk geometry from the label, i was able to configure the CMOS correctly for the disk to boot.

The yield: It boots into a windows 95 desktop, with a naked women with spread legs as a desktop background. I guess i recovered someones porn collection.

Teenage-me once found a DOS porn text adventure on a used 286 I bought from someone up the street, at a garage sale. This was shortly before dual-core processors hit the market as a common item, so the 286 was already ancient by then. Never found it anywhere else, but I later scrapped the thing without thinking to preserve any of the stuff on the disk, in part because I didn't yet realize this was rare software, and just assumed it existed other places. It was really simple even by the standards of that kind of thing, just a single encounter that started with specifying some physical stats for your, ah, partner, which affected some of the in-game descriptions. For all I know the previous owner wrote it themselves in BASIC or something, and that was the only copy in existence.

I once managed to rescue AlphaServer 255/233 from being parceled out by unknowing e-waste dealer. Spent a bit of time trying to connect everything, connected the serial terminal that came with it, flipped the power switch expecting empty machine...

... Lo and behold, I see it autobooting into heavily customized VMS 6.1 (first patch level that could boot on it), that turns out to be special Blockbuster Video version with appliance-style licenses loaded (NET-APP-150), probably designed to run with a DECserver connecting multiple terminals over LAT.

Turned out the second of two SCSI drives still held not just the custom BBV software, but also the database, including PII and history data, with flags like "18+" on various movies.

This happened to me once nearly a decade ago when I copped a Powerbook Duo 270c from a flea market in San Francisco and ended up with all the defense attorney's files for this dude: http://www.murderpedia.org/male.R/r1/rich-darrell-keith.htm :S

I used to salvage a lot of discarded PCs (use the parts, refurbish, etc.).

I quickly decided on a rule to immediately wipe any hard drive, and destroy any drive that couldn't be wiped.

One reason is that I'd been involved in some early online privacy discussions, so I had an awareness that snooping might be invasive.

But if curiosity might tempt me to rationalize away the nagging sense of possible invasiveness, there was a second reason...

I never wanted to technically be in possession of, say, a private photo that a 17.9 year-old took. Nor ever see anything worse than that. Thus, immediately pull and DBAN/destroy any hard drive.

Given that I eventually salvaged around 100 PCs, the private photos scenario didn't seem too unlikely.

I worked for Peter Gabriel (musician). He was throwing out his old iBook, so I took it. It had all his files on it, and all his logins. I could still log into his AOL email account.

I erased everything, pointed the browser to https://www.worldsdumbestgame.com/ , wrapped an elastic band around it to hold the button down and put it in a cupboard for two years.

It isn't uncommon and it does raise generally ethical questions. I rescued a VAX 4000/600 and found that it still had the original drives in the main chassis (they aren't obviously in there and the system had an external drive chassis that had been destroyed.) The disks contained the OS and a shipping ledger (it came from a logistics company) of shipments that had come and gone from SFO during it's lifetime. Just from, to, short description of the contents and a tag of 'customs duty' or not.

Given that it was clear the company thought they had destroyed all of the data on the system I went ahead and deleted all of the non-system related files, leaving just the OS and layered products that they had originally installed.

My personal experience with this: finding an old test NNTP server from Netscape. http://oldvcr.blogspot.com/2021/10/shiner-esb-apple-network-...

Archivists are increasingly sad and concerned that this generation of security and privacy may leave little trace of reality in history, but instead fill it with carefully-curated versions of history without the "undesirable" bits. It's definitely a tough problem to answer.

Old computers are the new "old farmer's barn". You open it up and find some interesting stuff inside.

I collected old machines about 20 years ago. It was very common to leave the data intact back then, even if it was being donated to a thrift store (where sale to an unknown party was assured) rather than being dropped at a recycle depot (where there was an assumption the machine would be destroyed).

There was no real dilemma regarding what to do with the data, it was wiped without peeking. I figured out that looking for interesting software was unethical early on, since launching some software will expose you to the prior owner's data automatically (e.g. databases) while browsing the directory structure for such software can open the perilous doors of curiosity. Not only that, but it is very rare for the data to require preservation. Most machines are intentionally disposed of. The cited case of a stolen computer is likely rare (though I suppose that depends upon one's sources and the market value of the machine).

I was recently given an old machine by someone I was barely acquainted with, data intact. He said he didn't mind if I looked, just destroy the data if I pass it on to someone else. I took the liberty to create bootable diskettes from the existing software since I haven't had a vintage computer in well over a decade. There was no question about how to handle the data though: even with permission, it had to be destroyed.

I still hold out hope that the very first game I ever made, in middle school using HyperStudio[0] on a Mac running At Ease for its desktop, will turn up on archive.org some day.

[0] It may have been HyperCard with some extensions for color. I distinctly remember color.

I bought an old Sparcstation at university auction. After gaining access found one of my professor's account. It was his workstation. Had a chuckle, wiped it, and installed FreeBSD.

Since we're sharing weird unwiped data stories, I'll tell mine:

I bought an old Dell PowerVault (rackmountable backup tape library) a few years ago. Upon taking out the drive that was already in there, I found that it still had a tape inside of it. I was able to dump the tape contents; it's files were all gzipped TAR streams. Inside those archives were assets and project files for... a ProtectMyID.com commercial.

I bought a MacSE at an estate sale and found a bunch of half written stories [novels?] (they weren't very good).

I'm so glad everything is password protected & encrypted on my machines now. Wouldn't want some rando to buy my funeral estate and find personal stuff on my hardware. My next of kin are my parents so I don't think they'd be very savvy about destroying drives.

people still leave unwiped hard drives into machines, sometimes because old and forgotten but sometimes because the usb bridge died but the actual hdd is working fine

beware

Not retro, but when I worked for a consulting company, one of our clients had just acquired a small electronics company. He gave me all the information he had about the product we were supposed to update. He did a data dump without looking closely at the files because one of the flash drives had a bunch of invoices issued by the previous software consulting company so we had a pretty detailed view into what they were paying that vendor. I turned them over to our GM. No idea if he ever used the information!

I was given a C64 with a case of floppies by a friend. It had been sitting in their attic not doing anything. The friend is also a nerd and was given it by a widow after her husband died as she "didn't know any computer stuff." Really weird feeling going through this guy's documents that survived.

Sadly something got shot on the board and I don't have the EE skills to fix or diagnose.

> We all have SSDs in our laptops now. These are hard to wipe

Not at all if you have an OPAL SSD which are quite common these days. These have a key which encrypts the data at rest and a user facing passphrase which decrypts this key. If you override the encrypting key, the rest of the data is gone unless you can break AES.

I have a big "hard disk museum." Partly because it's sort of a cool collection going back to old 5 1/4" platter days. But also because, at a minimum, I'd want to give the drives a few whacks with a sledgehammer before I tossed them. I'd also want to at least look through my floppies to make sure there's no "personal info backup" one.

This is nothing new - if you ever worked with computers, in a retail setting This is normal everyday life.

It's computer archaeology in a way, but the article would've been better if it covered the source code/discovery of e-waste lately for video game consoles.

> “We all have SSDs in our laptops now. These are hard to wipe because they come with firmware that stops the same sector being written over multiple times. This means the data you want to wipe isn’t completely removed, or at the very least, can be recovered by someone sufficiently motivated,” he says.

Is that really true? The idea you need a million passes always struck me as dubious.