All of this is to say that I’ve hand a longtime side interest in what I’ve termed “digital archaeology,” the attempt to recover lost pieces of computing history that I myself found particularly valuable or about which I’m particularly nostalgic.īack when I was using the Texas Instruments TI-99/4A Home Computer, my dad and I used to save programs on audio cassette tapes, a common way of saving and retrieving BASIC programs back then. Many of us who grew up in the 1980s are nostalgic for the purity of the technology we grew up with, just as we are also nostalgic for the purity of the early internet experience of the 1990s, being both the first generation to grow up with computers in the classroom and in our homes and the first generation to experience the internet as part of our formative teenage/college years. Sadly, with such rapid change in computer technology, to say nothing of the changes that occurred with the onset of the internet era in the mid-1990s, it was almost unavoidable that certain pieces of computing history would be lost to time. And, of course, in the early 1980s, as happened in many a 1980s California classroom, I spent lots of time on Tandy Radio Shack TRS-80 and Apple II computers. I’m not sure of the timeline, but we also had a Texas Instruments TI-99/4A Home Computer that I became much more familiar with, even writing fairly sophisticated programs in BASIC well before I even got to Kindergarten. When I was a very small child, my dad had an Epson QX-10 computer with CP/M as the operating system, on which I vividly remember playing the classic Colossal Cave Adventure text-based game with my dad. I’ve seen an incredible amount of technical change and progress in my nearly 42 years. Today, however, I want to talk about a different kind of archaeology: digital archaeology. I sometimes wonder if I’m in the process of making a transition from philosopher to classicist, given my interest in Latin and Ancient Roman philosophy, and my increasing interest in archaeology.
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