Watch An Apple IIc Boot Over 20 Years After It Was Last Turned Off

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:

This is the glory days of through-hole electronics, right here. Single-layer board! Jumpers and DIPs and headers, oh my. You could have repaired any part of this board with stuff on the shelf at Radio Shack. Back when Radio Shack sold radio stuff. Back when Radio Shack existed.

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.