Retro collectors are uncovering hoards of old data

This happened to me once nearly a decade ago when I copped a Powerbook Duo 270c from a flea market in San Francisco and ended up with all the defense attorney's files for this dude: http://www.murderpedia.org/male.R/r1/rich-darrell-keith.htm :S

Teenage-me once found a DOS porn text adventure on a used 286 I bought from someone up the street, at a garage sale. This was shortly before dual-core processors hit the market as a common item, so the 286 was already ancient by then. Never found it anywhere else, but I later scrapped the thing without thinking to preserve any of the stuff on the disk, in part because I didn't yet realize this was rare software, and just assumed it existed other places. It was really simple even by the standards of that kind of thing, just a single encounter that started with specifying some physical stats for your, ah, partner, which affected some of the in-game descriptions. For all I know the previous owner wrote it themselves in BASIC or something, and that was the only copy in existence.

Not retro, but when I worked for a consulting company, one of our clients had just acquired a small electronics company. He gave me all the information he had about the product we were supposed to update. He did a data dump without looking closely at the files because one of the flash drives had a bunch of invoices issued by the previous software consulting company so we had a pretty detailed view into what they were paying that vendor. I turned them over to our GM. No idea if he ever used the information!

It isn't uncommon and it does raise generally ethical questions. I rescued a VAX 4000/600 and found that it still had the original drives in the main chassis (they aren't obviously in there and the system had an external drive chassis that had been destroyed.) The disks contained the OS and a shipping ledger (it came from a logistics company) of shipments that had come and gone from SFO during it's lifetime. Just from, to, short description of the contents and a tag of 'customs duty' or not.

Given that it was clear the company thought they had destroyed all of the data on the system I went ahead and deleted all of the non-system related files, leaving just the OS and layered products that they had originally installed.

I think all of us old unix admins have variously been fascinated by the Apple Network Server boxes, and this one is a prototype even!