This is some old-school hacker shit right here!

No, seriously.

I work as an office assistant in the department of computer science in the Sydney Chapman building at the University of Fairbanks, Alaska (all you would-be stalkers can hunt me down now).

I work from 2:30 to 5 pm each day. This overlaps with my boss' schedule by like, half an hour. Yesterday they had me surplussing some old computer equipment (basically cataloging it to get rid of it, didn't catch all the details but I caught the important ones).

The old equipment was in this office that was in the grad student office. Two desks, which they're keeping, 2 monitors on the ground, a full computer system on one of the desks, assumed not to be working, and assorted miscellaneous equipment (mice, keyboards, speakers), and two very old tape drives.

One of the tape drives was dated 01/01/76, and was, from all places, purchased from NASA. It makes me wonder what's stored on the thing. Not having access to an old tape drive I'll never know. The other one was unlabelled.

The computer on the desk was all plugged in, so I decided to try booting it up. I clicked the button a few times (you know, like the ones they had in the 90's. Thing had a power and reset button, both stuck out. You don't find those on computers anymore), because it was old and would sometimes shut itself off as soon as it turned on, unless you hit it just right. It was an Intel processor (from when they used the slogan "intel Inside"... or do they still use that?) that was shipped with Red Hat linux installed, instead of the usual windows you always see. Pretty crazy as it is, right? (seriously, the computer had a sticker of red hat linux on it).

Well the thing is booting every little thing that an OS needs up just fine. Tells me this thing or that thing is ok. I don't speak it's language but its words are soothing to me nonetheless. When it finishes, it just says "J. Dart login:" for the guy who owned the computer.

This was some serious cloak and dagger shit right here. I felt like I'd just been transported back through time. It felt great.