I’m setting up some Raspberry Pis as internal servers, on kit I bought before the current price disruptions. The first now hosts my version control repositories, moved from a VM on my domain server to its own space in my DMZ. I can now access the repositories when on the road without punching a hole through my inner firewall.
This Pi has space for my old perforce (p4) repository, converted to git. It contains copies of my original visual source safe (VSS) repositories. VSS unfortunately occasionally corrupted stuff, which is why, in the day, I took backups. Even so, in the dreadnoughts I lost five months of version history. Unsurprisingly, after that, I switched to p4. I switched to git more recently for its portability.
Anyway, in a fit of nostalgia, I loaded a git–ised perforce–ised vss repository, and found, to my surprise, copies of my old poetry from the late 1980s. I’d forgotten they were there! There are versions of that work on this site now, but these are the original. They came from an Amstrad PC, with its whopping great 20M hard drive. That machine predated my use of version control by rather a long time. Regretably, I preserved no other data from that period, such as my nethack save files.
I kept that PC for many years, and only lost it a decade later when someone decided to ‘help’ me move, by switching the machine off and packing it without parking the disk first, despite me stating “do not touch that”. Old hard disks had to be parked before a computer was moved, otherwise the head might crash into the platter, wrecking both—which is what happened. This kind of situation wasn’t new to me: growing up, some family members got me used to presumptive incompetence, ignored warnings, & ignored instructions. I didn’t even tell the guy what he’d wrecked.
This small moment of nostalgia bought back memories of my first flat, when I bought the Amstrad and wrote the poetry. I might bore my partner later with this exciting information. I think she might just be more interested in the detail that the flat overlooked Runnymede, where the Magna Carta was signed.