Post #1649523
2026-03-17 13:20 UTC
@lproven Ah it's a sad story.
I used to do a lot of work in preservation, partly because when I was working on Edinburgh's Tardis program (I think @cstross was on that?) I had to drive around trying to find bits of hardware for maintenance from places like Daresbury Labs, and it was depressing seeing what they were throwing away - And this was in 1990 - But I would take what I could rescue in a van or car, and try to find places to store it.
Sadly two of the places were a storage unit, and the back of my land-rover for a while, and the storage unit was broken into and the Land Rover stolen (which is another rant) - So I lost 100% of the offline backups (tapes , listings and game-design notes), including the first Multi User game I wrote on a PRIME in 1984 (and also my first computer dating app in 1983/1984 too!).
I had some bits left, mostly the small bits, and I rebuilt a lot of it ( some on https://old.technology, the gallery software broke years ago, so there are no proper descriptions ).
I gave a bunch of my stuff to Bletchley Park when I moved to Canada, and resisted taking too much away. They had a PERQ there that I desperately wanted to crush and eradicate from history in the car park, but they wouldn't let me.
Weirdly, there was a submarine in the car park at the time too - But I am going way off topic :)
Replies (3)
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@lproven@social.vivaldi.net 2026-03-17 13:46
@lorry @cstross Oh my! That is _extremely_ unfortunate.
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@livcomp@hachyderm.io 2026-03-17 17:35
@lorry @lproven @cstross ah i remember.. "the best thing about PERQs is they don't run faster at night"
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@ianturton@mapstodon.space 2026-03-17 19:32
@lorry @lproven@vivaldi.net @cstross I was just going to say that I had played it on TARDIS. I recall it went brrrm brrrm if you asked for Laurie Oh those were the days, when I was first exposed to Unix while work was still on EMAS.