Amber64 - Mining Hacker History from Over 500k Commodore 64 Disks
Wesley McGrew
DEF CON 33 · Day 1 · Main Stage
Forty years ago, teenagers with Commodore 64 computers were dialing into bulletin board systems with stolen calling card codes, trading pirated software with groups operating across international bord
AI review
Wesley McGrew applied standard digital forensics methodology to a corpus of 650,000+ unique Commodore 64 floppy disk images, extracting recoverable text from deleted files, slack space, orphaned sector chains, and raw unallocated sectors, then indexed the full corpus in Elasticsearch. The resulting archive contains BBS session logs, phone phreaking materials, calling card codes, arrest accounts, PII, and previously uncatalogued software from the first decade of hacker culture.