Bad PR for Legacy Computer Users

I normally avoid blogging about missing people stories (too common and sensational) but this story of a British girl who escaped from a kidnapper has an interesting angle:

Police combing through the house where Natascha Kampusch was held captive for more than eight years have discovered her captor, a communications technician, used an obsolete computer.

Gerhard Lang of the Federal Criminal Investigations Bureau said kidnapper Wolfgang Priklopil relied exclusively on a Commodore 64 computer - a model popular in the 1980s but now considered an antique.

Lang told reporters the outmoded computer would complicate investigators’ efforts to transfer files for closer examination later, saying it would be difficult "to transmit the data to a modern computer without loss."

Incidentally, it's still possible to use the internet on a C64 using the Contiki web browser (named for the primitive boat Kon-Tiki, used to sail around the world). Lots of folks are still using their machines or the old software through emulation.

Categories: legacy computing, emulation