I’ve always been fascinated by the discovery of time capsules: a solid container buried underground or hidden inside certain structures, often containing documents and objects from a period lost in time.

A surprise to me was that I had a time capsule of my own without even knowing it: a forgotten Gateway CPU tower that was hiding away in my closet, last used in 2005.

Part 1: The Setup

I found the original keyboard and mouse next to the tower, but I still needed a power cable… which meant I had to go through the disaster cable pile. Trigger warning if you have OCD.

After ten agonizing minutes of cable management, I successfully extracted a power cable… then found another power cable all nice and neat in the closet. Of course.

I used an old monitor that I currently use for side projects, and my sweet rig was ready. The only omission was getting the computer online, because that would open up a Pandora’s Box that would lead to a lot of problems that I’m not at liberty to deal with. All I had to do now was press the power button and awaken a dormant beast.

I found myself feeling eerily nostalgic for a brief moment, but then it all faded away when Windows asked me for my password. I did not plan on this. Luckily, I rebooted in safe mode, logged in as an administrator and removed the passwords, rebooted once again, and logged in as myself. There, I was greeted with my old desktop, as provided by the long forgotten web comic White Ninja Comics. I had come home.

You’re absolutely right, White Ninja. My programs do suck.

From here on out, I wanted to capture images off of my old computer. Not from a camera, but directly off screen. This led to an obstacle course of me using WinZip on my old computer, uploading files onto my Taz floppy disk, taking that floppy disk to another computer that had a floppy drive and could handle thumb drives, transferring the files onto my thumb drive, then bringing it to my computer to move from the thumb drive to my own computer. Yeah, all that effort for this. I hope you appreciate it.

We unearth the hidden treasures of the computer on the next page!