How I introduced a 27-year-old computer to the web
This is just wonderful. About three and a half years ago I booted the first real computer from my childhood as well: a Commodore Amiga 500. I had one mission and that was to clone the hard drive so that I could get all the stuff off of it before time had its way with the bits (there are excellent Amiga emulators that can actually run old OS). Not having any experience soldering, I would have been crushed if I had experienced the failure of a capacitor. Fortunately, fate was kind to me.<p>In that experience I learned how incredibly difficult it is to get things on and off of computers this old. Even though I lived through all the advances, my mind has a much rosier picture of the capabilities of old hardware than is actually true. Similar to this author, I had to rely on serial connections and some utilities developed by the Amiga emulation community running in Windows on an old PC to actually get it to work. And boy was it slow to move data. It took something like 48 hours to move about 80 megabytes of data. I was worried that was too long for such a machine to be running, but it held out. One of the partitions did have a tiny bit of corruption, but I was overall surprised to find most of the data intact.<p>Sadly, my shoebox full of disks is probably never to be recovered. Both floppy drives seem to be failing and reading Amiga floppies on modern hardware is possible, but an expensive pain.