eBay listing, November 4, 2214:
Vintage Laptop Hard Disk 500GB
That’s the likely listing heading, when it goes up for sale online for lovers of old techknowldgy in 2214. What the buyer will find on it, will likely be of interest to a historian of culture and technology. There’s a few things that might stand out from the mundane data that most disks contain. Examples:
- A folder for an old massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG), World of Warcraft, which was released 210 years ago and was very successful for its era.
- transcripts from text-based chat software. A relic of pre-telepathic communications.
- A relatively small Music folder. Unsurprising, as the era of storing personal media files locally was on the decline with increasing cloud-based storage gaining popularity.
- The remaining used space (the drive is 75% full) is taken up by the other application software, mostly prouctivity and software development applications, and a few otheer notable games such as the sandbox of Minecraft, and even the first popular game library managers (Steam, and Battle.net).
- Last, but not least is the operating system itself (Mac OS X, a flavor of the ancient UNIX family of software which was popular with not just academics, but this one had many creatives using it as well).
This drive is in surprisingly good condition, considering drives of its kind had a useful operating lifetime of roughly 10-20 years, depending on usage and environment. This one sems to have seen light usage before being taken out, likely to use a much higher capacity drive, or even one with no moving parts. The drive was only powered on after being recovered from a “time capsule” to check its usability and contents. A real collector’s item, but there’s still no reserve because it’s value speaks for itself. Thanks for checking this listing out!
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I’m participating in Blogging 101. Here’s today’s prompt: