More longer friend see that sky?

It began with an accidental discovery. Someone played around with a legacy device just to see what made it tick, and at some point during the elaborate jury-rigging the discovery was made that it talked flawlessly with a state of the art modern security device. So flawlessly, in fact, that it defaulted to root access and allowed anyone to do whatever they wanted as long as the connection lasted

Naturally, this raised some concerns

This one particular vulnerability was patched with silent swiftness, but the implication had already been planted in the fertile minds of legacy device enthusiasts. If it could happen once, it could happen again. All that’s needed is the correct combination of old and new

Thus, the field of technoarchaeology soon became the next big thing. Finding and testing all permutations was a big undertaking, seeing as there are a lot of them. Gameboys and drones. Tamagotchis and smart houses. Prototype baby monitors and intercontinental ballistic missiles. No combination or permutation was too out there, too obscure, too unlikely. Gotta test ‘em all

What followed was a marginal increase in security, and a distinct increase in the quality of UI design. Old, forgotten ideas were rediscovered and reincorporated into new machines. Insights from previous eras were dusted off and included into contemporary textbooks. The affordances of old skool Winamp were made canon

Overall, it was the best possible use of resources earmarked for the war on terror, and everyone knew it