An old friend returns

2026-08-19 An old friend returns

While delving around it the loft over the weekend, on the pretence of throwing things away, I made sure to rescue at least one thing from certain doom - a twenty five year old iMac that I completed NaNoWriMo with.

Wiring the Mac back up and switching it on was rather more nerve-racking than I was really prepared for. Thankfully after an electrical whine, and the crackle of static through the CRT display, the “Apple” chord sounded from its built-in speakers, and it slowly woke from its years long slumber - taking it’s place alongside the Commodore 64.

After some rummaging through storage drawers I managed to find the ZIP drive, and a stack of long-forgotten ZIP disks - one of which contained the Scrivener drafts of the NaNoWriMo attempt.

I’m not sure what I’m going to use the Mac for - other than as a curious but beautiful oddity. It can’t connect to much of the modern internet, and pre-dates WiFi by some years too. I did manage to fill it up with some books from Project Gutenberg via an old USB stick. I also found an online project curating text files from the darker corners of the pre-internet - swathes of conspiracy theories and counter culture claptrap that I vaguely remembered reading while at college.

It’s a fun diversion, I guess.

Aside from the computer, I was handed a pile of old moleskine notebooks yesterday - going back at least twenty years. They didn’t get thrown away either - and while flipping through them, I realised how much more care I used to put into keeping notes. Page after page of carefully recorded system designs, doodles, and drawings.

I also found a few attempts at Manga - back before it became ridiculously popular among the Gen Z crowd;

It’s funny - looking back. Pages upon pages of projects I couldn’t remember - but then a name, or a place is mentioned, and huge swathes of memory return. Almost like turning a key in a locked door.

It goes without saying - this afternoon I hooked the most recent bullet journal down from the shelf, and began back-populating it. Bringing it up-to-date. It’s not as neat as the pages from the distant past, but there’s still something about physically writing things down. Something more permanent. Typing doesn’t achieve the same thing - I’m not sure why. There’s probably all sorts of attachment theory written about it.

Oh - one more thing - I might have ordered the box sets of the 1980s cartoons “He-Man”, and “She-Ra”. I’ll leave them running in the background of the study when I’m on work calls, to see how many incredulous stares I can cause.