Clean Up

One area of your ludicrously large office is for storage of old IT equipment. A locked cage holds a bunch of old laptops and even older desktop PC’s along with some random other technological detritus. You’ve been meaning to call Asset Disposal to come down and take it all away but, absurdly, since it was all once expensive equipment it’s all in some old inventory database so you’ll need to get the asset tags from everything. It’s an annoying chore but you get at it, pulling out several old laptops and making a note on a piece of paper of the asset numbers so you can fill out the form to have all this literal garbage taken to the recycling depot properly. None of this stuff is worth anything and all the hard drives have been removed to be crushed - keeping health data private is probably the thing the public cares about the most other than not dying of a plague - so you just stack it all up next to the cage as you work.

Finally, after finding a box of Blackberry 6510s, devices so old they have monochrome screens and external antennas you pull out, you find what must be the oldest piece of crap in the cage.

“What the actual shit is this?” You ask yourself as you look at a purple mid-tower computer. Everything about the design of it screams 90’s, and you see a stylized SGI logo that looks vaguely familiar.

Picking up the surprisingly heavy tower you set it down on the table, suddenly interested. You check your phone and quickly find the box is from Silicon Graphics, an SGI Origin 200 server. It must be from the mid 1990’s and you look on the back and see some cable plugs you don’t recognize.

Going back to the cage full of dead tech you see a weird looking cable and another small box with a power adapter. That must be for the SGI.

Without a second thought you're putting the tower up in the server rack on one of the empty shelves that will easily support the weight. You see the strange adapter that must be for the transfer of large amounts of data, and some quick Googling informs you it is a NUMAlink interconnect. That means absolutely nothing to you but the small, unlabeled box you found under the SGI has a slot for the same NUMAlink cable, which looks kind of like an old serial cable but more advanced.

Excited now you plug the NUMAlink cable into the SGI and the unlabelled box, which is much smaller than a PC and covered in connectors and slots. That probably is meaningless, since you don’t have anything else to plug into the unlabelled box - probably a fancy port replicator, just a way to interface different devices together - but it looks cool. Now you look at the back of the SGI and see the expected mouse and keyboard connectors. Since this server predates USB you think you may be stuck but hey, clearly whoever tossed this into the recycling cage put it all in there at once.

A few minutes of rummaging and you find a cardboard box in the cage with a few old PS/2 keyboards and mice. Now all you need is a super old monitor... which you definitely don’t see. But you do have an old LCD monitor from back in the day, and with a VGA cable from the box of old cables (every tech room has one) you get everything you need together.

You have no idea if this thing will power on. It has an Ethernet jack, Ethernet is a very old standard, but you don’t even consider plugging a network cable in. No chance you’ll plug in some random unknown server onto your network, that would be criminally stupid even if it’s unlikely the ancient server will power on never mind be able to get an IP address from the router.

Grinning to yourself, you plug in the power adapter to the SGI and wait. A hum starts up, and then a faint whine as a 30 year old fan starts to whirl. The screen flashes, it’s actually alive! It’s alive!

Giving a fist pump, you wait for a few long minutes while the server powers up. A few totally unknown screens flash (Syntax TotalNET? IRIX 6.5?), until a familiar logo appears - this server runs Windows NT 4.0! A very old flavour of Windows to be sure, but your quick Google search of the SGI Origin 200 lead you to believe it would have a proprietary operating system. That was probably the IRIX screen that flashed by, but you guess they installed Windows on top of that. Shit was weird back then.

Windows takes a long time to load, but once it’s done you see a mostly familiar desktop with basically nothing on it. There is the Start button on the bottom left, a clock in the system tray beside a small SGI logo, and the recycle bin.

The only other thing you can see is a shortcut on the desktop that says TAM. With a shrug, you double click on it and a command line program starts in a blue window. You see it’s a wrapper of some kind that’s running Turbo Pascal inside. Jesus, how old is this TAM thing? Must be a really old medical program from the dawn of time if it runs on Pascal. Finally, the window stops loading whatever it is, and a long list of instructions scrolls by in a programming language you assume is Pascal. Then the program finishes doing whatever it does and the blue command line screen goes blank, before flashing a new message.

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=========WELCOME TO========

===The Affection Multiplier!===

====CLICK [Y] TO PROCEED====

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The Affection Multiplier? Huh, well you wouldn’t have guessed that’s what TAM stood for, that’s for sure.