Apple PC found in attic after 30 years still works

Generation X gamers have been enjoying a trip down memory lane on Twitter, after a New York man discovered a working 1980s Apple computer, untouched for the past three decades.

On Saturday night, John Pfaff, a professor of law at New York’s Fordham University, stumbled across the Apple IIe desktop computer in the attic of his parent’s home. Surprisingly, the 30-year-old PC was in perfect working order.

The IIe went on sale in 1983, seven years after Apple released its first ever home computer, and included “features such as the ability to use both upper and lower case letters and full functionality of the Shift and Caps Lock keys”, CNN reports. Millions of units were sold before production ceased in 1993.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

The machine “serves up an immediate nostalgia gut punch to those old enough to remember the green-text motif that defined the era”, says Mashable’s Jack Morse.

Pfaff went on to share some of the highlights of his nostalgic odyssey, including text-based games, a letter typed by his late father in 1986 and floppy disks containing old school assignments.

Pfaff’s tweets have received hundreds of thousands of retweets and a deluge of comments from fellow “1980s kids” sharing their own memories from the early days of home computing.

Although the discovery sparked fond memories for gamers who grew up in the 1980s, to a younger generation the once-cutting edge technology seemed more like an ancient artefact.

“My oldest, who is nine, exclaimed ‘that’s a computer?!’ in genuine surprise, and then pointed at the floppy drives and asked ‘what are those?’,” Pfaff said. “My younger twins just kept laughing at how silly it seemed to them.”