Nostalgia

TradeWars 2002 built its universe from a random number and then threw the number away. The whole map, every warp and every port, turns out to be recoverable from three sectors, because the number was never random enough to hide.

A stranger's message about a dead link led to recovering all 52 scans of a found Nirvana collage book from the Wayback Machine, re-registering the lapsed domain, and giving the book a permanent home.

I spent weeks hunting for the compiler that built a 1990s DOS game byte-for-byte. The instruction no Turbo Pascal would emit turned out to be a single overlay directive I'd never tested.

A recovered home directory from New Mexico State University, circa 2001. Tokenizers, red-black trees, a Unix shell, parallel Mandelbrot sets, and a Dots-n-Boxes AI that knows it sucks.

A recovered archive of Turbo Pascal homework from Balboa High School in the Panama Canal Zone, 1993-1994. BBS door programs, blackjack games, sorting benchmarks, and a 16-year-old trying to get on the Internet.

Rediscovering the source code of Signalnine, a 2002 blogging platform built by CS students that pioneered community-driven web platforms before WordPress.

Using Ghidra to reverse-engineer a Delphi 4 DOS game executable, reconstruct its binary data formats, and rewrite the game from scratch.