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How’s about this for nostalgia? Over the weekend, John Pfaff, a New York law professor, went viral after he discovered an old Apple IIe computer sitting in his dad’s attic. In a series of tweets, he shared his excitement over the decades-old vintage find, showing the world that the computer works perfectly fine despite the test of time.
Perhaps the most interesting moment of the saga comes the moment when Pfaff turned on the machine. It prompted him to go back to his save from Adventureland, a text adventure game from 1978, right after he put a disk into the computer. ” Put in an old game disk. Asks if I want to restore a saved game. And finds one! It must be 30 years old. I’m 10 years old again,” he tweeted.
Phaff even later went on to try out several other games, including the trivia title Millionware, Olympic Decathlon, and Neuromancer. As if that wasn’t enough nostalgia, he even discovered a touching letter which his father typed to him in 1986, when he was just a young boy. “Just found this letter my dad typed to me in 1986, when I was 11 and at summer camp.” “My dad passed away almost exactly a year ago. It’s amazing to come across something so ‘ordinary’ from him,” he tweeted.
Subsequent postings from Phaff reveal that his father regularly backed up the computer with floppy disks, of which he also discovered. “Also, in the days before the Cloud, kids, you had to make sure you backed up your backups because those floppies could betray you,” he joked.
The Apple IIe originally launched in 1983 for $1,395, which would be roughly $3,510 today. It was discontinued in 1993, but had introduced the ability to use uppercase and lowercase letters with a built-in shift and caps lock key.
While not everyone might have an old Apple IIe computer in their attic, there are still many ways to experience nostalgia from years past. A team at CERN recently built a version of the WorldWideWeb browser that lets you browse the web like it was in 1990. There is even an emulator that can lets you celebrate the 35th birthday of the Mac by running old software without the need to source an original installation CD or Apple ROM.
