Stocks of factory fresh computers, just waiting for a party to find them?

[kato13]

I worked at Frestone tires ~1990 we were literally building an Intranet from scratch (not using the internet but our own dedicated phone lines). Attempting to wire all 1500 service locations and all our other inftrstructure we owned together into a single network. Ambitious and the Largest IT faluire (1.1 billion for naught) up to that time.

We had 1600 of the most advanced workstations of the time, stored in a huge safe, which a near as I could tell was fully shielded from EMP (no radio signals of any kind in the room). They were behind a 3 inch steel door, on wooden shelves, powered off with no cables connected.

The timeline for my specific case is too early, but, the internet never really going public due to cold war security concerns and general tech malaise instead of the "tech boom" could explain a 5 year shift. If that is the case, players going to the 34th floor of 205 North Michigan would find a priceless treasure trove.

Canon kinda has to have that shift in tech as I think the creators of T2k, in 1984, like everyone else underestimated how common PCs would be in 1997. Estimates put the total number of units at something like 400 Million world wide at that time. Even if only one in a thousand survived, RESET does not have much value. (Which is why I changed it to be similar to linux which could run on ANY surviving processor, use clustered chips, and connect disparate networks)