Apple's long-lost hidden recovery partition from 1994 has been found

<i>How many personal computers in 1994 still had the ability to boot after the OS was trashed?</i><p>In the DOS&#x2F;Windows world, you&#x27;d insert the boot floppy you made and boot from that in order to undo changes that prevented the main system from booting, but DOS is simple enough that it&#x27;s easy to make additional copies of it (two kernel files, and one shell); in that era, I&#x27;d make all my floppies bootable.

That old MacOS UI looks so appealing. I want to use it and I don&#x27;t care that it&#x27;s low-res, black and white. I love that they created what seems like a texture in the window titlebars, I assume to give them physical-like presence and to encourage grabbing them.<p>I don&#x27;t want to use my computer&#x27;s UI; it&#x27;s just necessary and slightly annoying in its aesthetics and cognitive load.

I love people like this who are so dedicated to understanding things from our past. Really, it makes no difference to the world if this is every fully understood or not. But it&#x27;s their passion, and it shows. And I think that&#x27;s wonderful.

Every time I hear mention of Connor and Connor Peripherals Inc. I get the shivers. Not this has much to do with Apple&#x27;s hidden recovery partition other than Connor drives are mentioned here.<p>Never have I experienced worse drives than those made by Connor Peripherals Inc. I&#x27;ve had them fail on many occasions—they&#x27;d fail if so much as to look at them.<p>I recall one instance where I&#x27;d spent hours setting up my computer and all was OK only to drop a small manual onto the table from a few inches height. The next thing that happened was the OS chucked an &#x27;Abort, Retry or Ignore&#x27; message. Drive was completely dead.

Mac A&#x2F;UX systems from that era created an &#x27;Eschatology&#x27; partition for autorecovery. I always liked the name.

I remember using these CD caddy Performas in elementary school when they were relatively new and being somewhat confused by the why, as we had a tray loading audio CD player in our living room at the time.

Funny I watched a video from „this does not compute“ where he worked on a rare Apple prototype. The drive had the very same issue and he fixed it the same way.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;OM64l8tZSwY?si=WhEtsVPpcI21YmLn" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;OM64l8tZSwY?si=WhEtsVPpcI21YmLn</a>

I&#x27;m not a classic Mac OS expert, but the way it works seems extremely convoluted and un-Apple-like. Instead of copying the mini system folder to the desktop and asking the user to copy the files to the real system folder, couldn&#x27;t they just automatically copy the files to the system folder?

Absolutely incredible long read. I adore people who commit themselves to archival works like this.

I definitely support the author&#x27;s &quot;make an image of the hard drive as soon as you buy vintage hardware&quot;.<p>There have been some amazing finds that way, especially game prototypes. Often, the data has been marked deleted and every time the system is used, it&#x27;s more likely to be overwritten.<p>It&#x27;s also a good idea because old drives could stop working at any time, and unless someone else has shared an image from the same device, there may not be a good way to use it again without copying that drive image to a newer replacement.

I remember an old rackmount computer at my first job, where you had a row of switches on the front, and you&#x27;d have to clock in the boot sequence, each time.<p>It was actually before my time (but not by much).

If I were a Paul Allen-tier billionaire, I’d endow university chairs in ‘Computer Archaeology’ specifically for people doing this kind of meticulous digging. It’s fantastic work, clarifying how operating systems evolved—though arguably just a bit more practical than crawling around ancient Greek ruins searching for fragments of the past.