Every once in a long while, in some quarry, in a land split by glaciers millions of years ago, some paleontologist will happen upon a fossil. And that fossil will be of a creature nobody has ever seen before. And every once in an even longer while, a forgotten piece of computing history will resurface, opening up a quarry of technology that had long been lost. That’s the story of the NABU machines discovered in a barn Massachusetts. Here’s more from MOTHERBOARD:
And the reason anyone did notice was because this barn could no longer support the roughly 2,200 machines that hid on its second floor. These computers, with a weight equivalent to roughly 11 full-size vehicles, were basically new, other than the fact that they had sat unopened and unused for nearly four decades, roughly half that time inside this barn. Every box was “new old stock,” essentially a manufactured time capsule, waiting to be found by somebody.
These machines, featuring the label of a forgotten brand built around an idea that was tragically too early to succeed, could have disappeared, anonymously, into the junkyard of history, as so many others like them have.
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