SiliconClassics
Experienced Member
Like many of you, I occasionally come across a used computer whose owner neglected to erase personal files from the hard drive. Usually there's not much of interest on it - a few photos of family, some correspondence in Word documents, etc. And usually I end up erasing and reformatting the entire drive as part of an OS reinstall.
But yesterday I bought a PowerBook 280C for $10 from a girl in Manhattan. She claims it was her father's, and that it hadn't worked for years - even with the power adapter plugged in, it refused to boot, though the green power LED did illuminate.
Well, after I got it home, I simply yanked the main battery and this little PB fired right up! It booted to MacOS 7.5 and it's a veritable time capsule, full of files and apps dating back to 1996. There are quite a few Internet utilities installled - web browsers, PPP, newsgroup readers, etc. The owner appears to have been quite tech-savvy, and his e-mails and docs reveal that he worked for a trading firm on Wall St. There are also a few personal SimpleText documents on the desktop, which appear to be awkwardly-written "end of romance" letters from his less than articulate ex-girlfriend.
But the most interesting find was in an innocuous desktop folder called "binaries." It contains a couple hundred porno jpg files, each of which takes about 30 seconds to decompress, color-convert, and display using JPEGview. Ah, the good old days, downloading low-res JPEG images one at a time with an unreliable 28.8k modem, and oogling them on a 256-color screen! Most of the smut is pretty mundane, but I stumbled upon one odd GIF that was a black and white closeup of a horse's ass. Yes, literally. Ha! I cracked up for a good minute after seeing that one.
Of course, for privacy purposes, I will keep the owner's identity confidential, and I'll erase all his personal files eventually. Anyone else ever come face-to-face with a stranger's personal foibles via their old computer?
But yesterday I bought a PowerBook 280C for $10 from a girl in Manhattan. She claims it was her father's, and that it hadn't worked for years - even with the power adapter plugged in, it refused to boot, though the green power LED did illuminate.
Well, after I got it home, I simply yanked the main battery and this little PB fired right up! It booted to MacOS 7.5 and it's a veritable time capsule, full of files and apps dating back to 1996. There are quite a few Internet utilities installled - web browsers, PPP, newsgroup readers, etc. The owner appears to have been quite tech-savvy, and his e-mails and docs reveal that he worked for a trading firm on Wall St. There are also a few personal SimpleText documents on the desktop, which appear to be awkwardly-written "end of romance" letters from his less than articulate ex-girlfriend.
But the most interesting find was in an innocuous desktop folder called "binaries." It contains a couple hundred porno jpg files, each of which takes about 30 seconds to decompress, color-convert, and display using JPEGview. Ah, the good old days, downloading low-res JPEG images one at a time with an unreliable 28.8k modem, and oogling them on a 256-color screen! Most of the smut is pretty mundane, but I stumbled upon one odd GIF that was a black and white closeup of a horse's ass. Yes, literally. Ha! I cracked up for a good minute after seeing that one.
Of course, for privacy purposes, I will keep the owner's identity confidential, and I'll erase all his personal files eventually. Anyone else ever come face-to-face with a stranger's personal foibles via their old computer?
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