After that, a collector wrote to him and offered to buy the device.

The story of the salvage of the sunken DT80 terminal, which began construction in 1979. shared Author of a small YouTube channel called RingingResonance. In November 2021, an engineer pulled the device out of a stream near an old illegal trench. The man brought the terminal home and cleaned it of the main layer of dirt and algae that, among other things, had sprouted inside the case.

The next time the engineer returned to the device only when free time appeared in January 2022. Then the blogger decided to try to restore the device. According to him, he almost did not believe in this idea, because, judging by the damage, the terminal was lying at the bottom of the stream for a long time and it was badly damaged.

Motherboard before cleaning

Motherboard after cleaning

After the engineer successfully cleaned the body and major components of dirt, he found that some components were missing or out of order. The blogger suggested that part of the ROM was rendered unusable due to a sudden voltage drop caused by a lightning strike. However, it is not clear because the individual components do not work perfectly.

Despite the failed boards in the 1980s, the engineer decided to continue restoring the terminal. To do this, he replaced some components with analog ones, then wrote a debugger and his own firmware for the device. Blogger has published the entire code of his utilities in the public domain GitHub If someone else suddenly fishes a similar terminal from a creek next to an illegal dump.

As a result, the engineer was able to completely restore the failed components and launch the terminal. He opened several ASCII arts on the DT80, including an image of the Aperture Science logo from Portal and Spider-Man. The blogger said that after he published one of the latest videos about the restoration of the device, he was contacted by a collector who offered to buy a terminal for the museum.