VBox is a time machine…

On and off for a week now I’ve been attempting to create a Virtual Box VDI from an old set of Norton Ghost CDs I created back in 2003 — mostly for the entertainment value of it.

Tonight, I was successful.

Right where I left it on August 7th, 2003.

It’s interesting to have a fully functional “moment in time” of an evening seventeen years ago… So much of my online life back then was MP3s, MSN Messenger, and Alfandria/FurryMuck.

A few things didn’t work quite right:

  1. Norton SystemWorks 2003 was mad because my subscription apparently ended in 2004.
  2. The MSN Messenger service simply doesn’t exist anymore so the client was convinced there was a firewall preventing it from reaching the servers.
  3. My SimpleMU bookmarks no longer work because the servers have moved.
  4. And Outlook tried to check my email at Comcast and got notification that my account didn’t exist.

But some things still surprisingly worked like a champ… Like, eMule fired right up, found servers, and wanted to resume the torrent of an album I didn’t finish 17 years ago. Ad-Aware 6 automatically did a scan on boot. And Mad At Gravity started playing when I clicked play on WinAmp…

There’s also all of the odd bits of data; old roleplaying game plot lines and hastily jotted story notes, half finished artwork in the ‘recent’ section of Photoshop 7, and pieces of websites I was working on in NetObjects Fusion.

Ahh reminicence.