[vejeta]

Author of the article here, I encourage you to do so, and share the results!

I started this journey in 2006, doing the same as you, crawling old usenet archives in the newsgroups interface taht groups.google.com provided. Finding the code was troublesome, because I lost track of it, when moving from floppy disks, to different storage systems, until it has finally been preserved on github.

I find it fascinating that your father had a VT220, did he have it at home or in his office. I thought that kind of terminals were more like a thing of labs.

[xenophonf]

Regarding that VT220, I misremembered. My dad's workplace loaned him a 1200-baud modem and a C. Itoh terminal, maybe a CIT-101 because [this picture](https://terminals-wiki.org/wiki/index.php/File:C._Itoh_CIT-1...) matches my memory. He was a software engineer and occasionally worked from home.

We also has a Wyse 50 terminal. It's how we used the IMS 5000SX, which had both a 10-MB hard disk drive (I think it was called a Winchester) and a 5.25" floppy disk drive. I have a huge stash of 5.25-inch floppy diskettes from back then, including copies of TurboDOS (for the 5000SX) and Apple II games and little BASIC programs us kids wrote, but I've all but given up on recovering anything. The IMS 5000SX and the Wyse 50 terminal are long dead and buried. I've made some half-hearted attempts to boot TurboDOS up under simh, but it isn't the same. If they aren't all corrupt, I suspect my Apple diskettes have a virus of some kind on them, too.

Around 1991-1992, I helped a dentist install an electronic medical record system using a multi-user DOS variant called PC-MOS. We connected Link MC5 terminals via serial to a 386 running SoftDent, if I'm remembering it correctly. I got one of MC5s when that system was decommissioned. Unfortunately, I lost it in a house fire. Then, a few years later, I got another of the MC5s when the dentist was doing some housecleaning. I still have that one, and I'd use it more often if there wasn't something wonky with its serial interface's flow control that causes corrupted I/O.

[vejeta]

Ah,that makes more sense. I see you inherited that engineering chops from your father, and that story with the dentist made me chuckle, it sounds like the first freelance attempts in the 20s :D

I started getting old computers back in the day, even a bulky IBM with AS/400, featuring a PowerPC RISC architecture, although it worked, and I learned how to login and all, I donated it to a friend that have a garage full of all kind of machines, that probably could preserve it better than me.

Regarding, the apple diskettes with virus, probably they are nowadays worth preserving too (for some archeological sleuthing) :D Thanks for sharing this story.!