Many years ago (want to say ~2010-ish timeframe), I needed to get data off of an old Pentium machine at my mom's house.

My first thought was to just pop out the hard drive, put it in an USB HD enclosure and Linux would automagically detect everything.

Turns out the drive was so old that Linux could NOT detect the drive. My next thought was to see if it would boot and it did! (Windows 98 IIRC)

But then the next problem: how to get data off of the machine? It had an ethernet port but no wifi.

So I did the following:

- Plugged in an ethernet cable

- Opened the browser (IE 4!)

- Downloaded putty and the putty scp binary

- scp'ed the data from the box to a Linux box

- Success!

It really is wild how older technology can still work nowadays.