 So speaking at DEF CON is kind of tough. I'm going to put this here so it will be easier for everyone. There's thousands of you. You all look like a swarm of people. I'll just hold it. Can you hear me now? We're all good? All right. So you can see a quote here. It's from a science fiction book. It's about when we get out into space and we discover that all the species we're expecting to run into, we missed them. Not by distance but by time. They're millions of years gone. We finally find them and they're millions of years gone and we go down to their planets and we try to figure out who they were and we discover that all the data from these advanced civilizations is lost. We don't know what they did because they stored all this stuff on things that evaporated quickly. They were destroyed by time. A term that we're going to get to called bit rot. And it's important as we move further into this digital age that we take time out of our lives to find and protect the data that needs to be protected. So a good bit of this talk is going to be discussing the methodology and the importance of what we as a group of hackers need to do to protect some of this data and some of our tools and certain aspects of our professional skill sets are uniquely suited to that. So without further ado, this is amateur digital archeology and a hacker is just another word for amateur. If you want to be a professional you go over to black hat. Defcon is about the amateurs. It's about the new guys, the young guys, the people who don't know any better yet. That's what a hacker is. A hacker walks into something and says I'm a hobbyist. I'm going to figure this out. So you might be wondering why any of this is important. This is a sub-genre of technology. But if we're in Mosul watching ISIS get annihilated and you have a reporter walking down the river and finds three dead bodies, he could either look at them and take a photo and keep going or dig through their pockets. If you dig through their pockets, you might find that they have a cell phone on them. And if they have a cell phone on them, that cell phone might have a memory card. And if there's a memory card, there might be pictures and data. So there's a great article done by these two guys from BBC where one of the guys dug through some pockets, found some photos, was looking at the pictures and realized the place he had been staying in was the same place they had been staying in. So he dug around and found a whole bunch of data related to these three guys, these three-foot soldiers. He figured out that they were an artillery squad, that they had received certain orders, that he identified who they all were. Then he started going back to the places that came from and built a composite sketch on who these guys were, these random nobodies who worked for ISIS. And this gives us a unique insight into who these people were at this momentous moment in time. Something that we're talking about right now, 100 years from now, people might not understand. They might be looking at a newspaper and go, what the hell is ISIS? Who's Mosul? Come on. And this is what we call primary source information. If you're familiar with Howard Zinn who wrote a People's History of the United States, he wrote a history of the United States focused on primary source information, the things that you find where people experienced history, saw history, and they provide a bias perspective that's unmarred by not knowing, not having been there. This is what the U.S. National Archive has to say about primary sources and their importance in developing critical thinking for children, but it's also truly important for any historian to build an idea of where their version of history sits in relation to the people who lived it. This is what our friend Adam has to say at NYC Resistor on EE PROMs, which are primary source information. He says, find a board with a brain. If you're a hacker, any sort of chip you see that has a brain, has memory, is primary source information. So this is kind of the thrust of what we're going to be talking about. And in regards to amateur archeology, it's part of being an amateur is recognizing your limitations. You're not a professional archeologist or anthropologist, and you shouldn't think of yourself as one. You should, you know, do what they expect you to do, but also recognize that you have limitations. You're not going to go up here and start dropping a professional grade peer review paper. What you can do, however, is protect data for them to write their paper. And the other great thing is, is because you're dumb, you can accomplish things that other people didn't think were possible, like flight. And I know some of you guys here might be a little pissed off that Joe Random Idiot managed to get their hands on something that's probably of historical significance and should probably be in museum. It's important that you remember that this is DEF CON, and we are a more Lando Cal regime than we are, Professor Jones. Most of the people here are perfectly okay with that, but for those of you who are still concerned, the National Air and Space Museum has several grid compasses and several grid cases. These are the styles of machines that we have. They also have one that was flown several times, and they have never released information related to what data was on them. They've only ever said, here's a laptop. It's off. It's sitting in a booth. It's like a dead machine. You don't have a full composite idea of what they did and why they did it. This is from recent news. This was published maybe a couple weeks ago. It hit ours, Technica. And the photo there is a photo of an old tape system. These were the data systems that did the analysis for Pioneer 8 through, I believe, 10. And that's the OIG report number. That URL that I referenced in the beginning and will reference throughout has a lot of this data available if you want to dig through the actual data I went through. And it's sad that the machines that analyzed Pioneer missions basically ended up sitting outside of a contracting office in the elements and an engineer brought them home, put them in his basement, and they got so destroyed by mold and the elements that when OIG finally found them and tried to see if there's any data they could pull off them or any significance to them, they actually said it's safer to destroy them than it is to try to analyze them because of the mold. It was a toxic health hazard to the investigators. It's important that we protect a lot of this data because it's starting to go away and this is a really good project that has a direct tie to DEF CON. Enter NYC Resistor. Our friend Chris Fenton wrote a FPGA implementation of the Cray 1. And the Cray 1, if you've never heard of the Cray super computing company, you can ask someone else here. It's a formative moment in super computing history. The Cray 1 operating system is gone as far as anyone knows. Anyone here has access to an original Cray 1. Talk to me or Internet Archive later. The reality is as far as anyone knows that operating system is lost to history. Most people had Crays burn their media when they were done. He did find a guy who was willing to give him a dispatch that he thought had Cray 1 on it and brought it back from Australia. And he built an analog reader, read the analog waveform, and I got an e-mail while I was at DEF CON saying, hey, I've got about 40 gigs of analog waveform that I need to analyze and find bits in. And it just so happened I was sitting right next to Jason Scott of the Internet Archive and handed him the phone. And he immediately helped them host it. And within a couple of days they had two guys from Sweden and Norway who had written analysis software to figure out the bits. And then they started figuring out file systems. And then they were building it and writing it in emulation. And the next thing you know, the Cray 1 XMP projects, often running some races, are able to kind of resurrect maybe not Cray 1, but a Cray operating system that otherwise would have been lost. And none of these people or professionals are getting paid for this. This is what people do in their free time. This is Jason Scott from the Internet Archive. If you run into him at DEF CON, give him a hug. He's a good guy. And the other question you might be asking is a Cray is an exotic machine. It's something cool from history. Why do we have to give a shit about a 386? And fundamentally the machine we're going to be talking about is a 386 with a math coprocessor. So maybe closer to a 46 or a 37, whatever you want to call it, that's what it is. The importance of it is where it sat in history, what it did. And you should never judge a book by its data. Like this guy writes 140 character messages and they are considered incredibly important. I'm not getting into the politics of the person, but the data is important. It defines aspects of our life. It defines market movements, things like that. And I know Europeans have this approach to data that says we have a right to be forgotten. Star Wars kid has a right to be forgotten. He shouldn't be judged his entire life based off of a five minute video. But at the same time we're losing so much data that defines who we are and is important in understanding the scope and impact of things that are of historical significance that sometimes the context matters. The Trump Presidential Library ironically does expose a major flaw in our archival knowledge. He writes so much shit on Twitter. He just did a policy initiative on Twitter and announced it there that for the first time ever internet archivist or real archivist actually have to figure out how they're going to address social media. How do we get this data, store it, put it in a library because it is important. It's incredibly important for future historians to understand how the legislature evolved, how historically these things occurred. And the other one in this list is SoundCloud. I'm not sure how many of you are familiar with SoundCloud, but SoundCloud is a cultural thing. I'm not sure what you call that, just a huge value. It's all these artists producing music and then disappearing or becoming popular. But there's so much music in there that defines our culture as we evolve across an entire geopolitical spectrum as the internet begins to bring us together. We get to see these independent components start to meld. And they just announced 40% layoffs and there's a real fear that SoundCloud will disappear and then all the data will disappear and a lot of these artists won't be able to repost it. So the internet archive is trying to figure that out. I recommend donating if you give a crap. Grid. Why is the grid laptop important? The grid laptop was the first laptop, arguably. It was the first clamshell ever and that was the grid compass. That is the progenitor prior to the ones we're going to be talking about, which are grid case. This URL, highly recommend grabbing. It's a computer history museum, got four of the original founders of Grid to talk about how Grid was developed, what it was important for, and it's kind of a great loser's story for the Pirates of Silicon Valley. These guys developed their own laptop, the first one ever. They had Xerox Park people, they stole people from the early Apple and they developed their own first operating system called GridOS. And then they sat in a meeting with IBM and IBM was like, hey, would you like to license your operating system for our new IBM PC? And they said, no, of course not. Why would we do that? And then MS-DOS destroyed them. Bill Gates is personally responsible for annihilating Grid. And here's a further NASA history provided by one of the engineers who worked on Grid. The compass was the first laptop in space by a matter of microseconds. TI had a laptop on the same shuttle flight and you have to think about this. This is a first personal computer that made it into space. That's huge. It's the first time that an astronaut is able to use a computer on a space shuttle that isn't like a guidance system or a component that specifically does a job. It changed the way we approached space. Grids were huge in the US government as well. A lot of people who know anything about grids know that they have a reputation as being the government's computer, as being the rugged computer. They're originally designed for business men and none of that's entirely true, but the US government did use a lot of them. The NSA used them. They had software written called scrubbing bubbles that scrubbed bubble memory of any data. The NRO used them. Supposedly the football was at one point a grid. NASA used them. Speiwar and other military forces used them. Supposedly these guys brought demolition charges with them to destroy them when they were potentially compromised. And Marines and aliens in 1986 used them to fight aliens. So there's a gratuitous shot of a grid fighting aliens. I know a lot of you were expecting me to be like I found aliens on the laptop. This is the closest I got. But before we get into the task of ripping apart this, let's talk about how the hell you get your hands on old NASA gear. And this is kind of a big storyline. You can buy pretty much anything as at a government auction. The government auctions occur as like Gulf liquidation comm or all these private enterprises that sell stuff or they occur in a state level. New York state, for instance, has an eBay store. And stuff gets sold there. I mean it's whenever they're done with it and it no longer has value, it gets sold. And this is a great quote from a French guy, Francois. He was talking to a guy on eBay who got visited by the FBI and they were like hey where the hell did you get all this shit? Because he started selling some stuff on eBay. And he had gotten it a scrap. And what he was selling was Apollo guidance computers. Anyone who knows anything about NASA or your own history knows the Apollo guidance computer is the first micro controller in silicon. It is a formative component of all of technological history. As we were landing people on the moon, we developed the first silicon parts and we developed the first silicon micro controller. So everything that any of you do is impacted by this, this device. And the AGC is formative. Some guy in France bought it off an eBay guy who just happened to have a fully functional AGC. How does this happen? Like how did the AGC, any of them make it out into the world where some guy combined on eBay, why was it sold to scrap? Nobody could tell you. And yet this one guy in France, if you hit his YouTube feed, has an AGC. I do recommend when you're done after this, he's got a great breakdown on how he accessed memory, how he read some of the data. And he talks about the operating system. He can't pull the operating system off of the AGC he has without destroying it, although there is a copy of data for another AGC component that he doesn't have. The question is how do we preserve the data that was on the AGC? And some of you may know that that's out there now, it's on GitHub. The way it was preserved is one guy went to MIT and found the printed copies of all of the source code and transcribed them into a laptop. And he did this about seven or eight years ago and just recently a NASA intern found out about it and posted it to GitHub. And suddenly there's pull requests against 1960 software. People were founding bugs. So in this case, we found software hiding in hard copy. That's pretty cool. So some of you might be sitting here going, this is entertaining, but it's not great. We're talking about formative components of our history. This is like Wilbur and Orville's first flight. Try to imagine going to your art sale and finding the first airplane. It shouldn't happen. So you might be asking yourself, well, what do I do about it? Where in my life do I find this sort of history lying around? And what I want to tell you is this is DEF CON, man. There's history happening here today. People are developing things, doing things. You don't know it at the time. I was at HAR, hacking at random in 2009, getting hammered with a bunch of Italians at their embassy. And two years later, I'm watching in the news and then I'm watching at a movie, that exact event occurring because there was this young blonde-haired jerk who was like, I'm going to put all your secrets on the internet. And that happened. So WikiLeaks basically occurred initially at HAR. History is happening all around us all the time. So you might be asking specifically, well, that's not like a NASA flight system. How the hell do you get your hands on a NASA flight system? I found them being auctioned. There are a couple of auctions that specialize in space memorabilia. And some of the lesser ones, not like Christie's, which will sell you things for 10 grand, will sell you things for nothing at all because nobody knows what they are, whether or not they're important. The Space Shuttle is one of those areas where nobody really cares because it's not Apollo. We didn't land on the moon. And a lot of people don't see it as formative, even though it's the early days of spaceflight. We're talking about the first laptops in space and yet nobody cares. But they will. It's history. If you're ordering from an auction, be careful. Everything about auctions are shady. A lot of upper-tier auction houses put a lot of effort into establishing where something came from, what it is. We're going to talk in a moment about how you identify an artifact and authenticate it. Auctions don't necessarily do that. This is the original auction that I saw. There's two of them a year apart. The first one was the STS41PGSE. As far as I can tell, they made that up. The Space Shuttle payload and general support computer that came later, they didn't make up. I guess the first one had some paperwork with it, so they just kind of assumed. The other one had none. So they just also kind of were like, well, we have this thing, where it's providence is from. You might be wondering how much these things cost me on my bottom. The first one I actually put in the bid for $1,337. And that's what I got it for. Second one a little bit less. So authenticating artifacts. This is important. As some of you may know, I once forged ShmooshCon badges. Easiest way was visually at first because you're looking at images on the internet. How do you visually identify this as being accurate? This is a Smithsonian shot from the Smithsonian's website saying this is a PGSC grid case as opposed to a compass. There are things that you can identify immediately. The blue Velcro. NASA loves Velcro. They love that light blue color. Look for where it is placed, that sort of thing. Look at the font used on the text and lettering added. Look for the modifications specifically done. You can see that they added a fan. And it's important the fan. Anyone who knows anything about space travel knows that convection doesn't work in zero G. So any laptop without a fan is going to die. It's the same reason that an astronaut will die if the circulation stops in any of their spacecraft. The CO2 will pull in front of their face and they'll die from the CO2. Even though there's plenty of oxygen, convection doesn't work. Hard copy is the other one. If you have the opportunity and you can find data, you can see on there there was a said number listed, a part number as well. And you can go look on either hard copy files which I didn't have the time, or you can go to their website and look for those said numbers. I found exactly one reference to that particular said number. But it did identify it as a PGSC system and it specifically identified that said number and several others. This comes from the NASA website. Also, here's a snapshot of a video of a national astronaut on the shuttle working with a PGSC. Same style and design. So it looks legit. We buy it. Shouldn't the memory have been pulled, right? I mean, DOD did work for, NASA did work for the DOD in the 1990s. So here's a problem with buying something that's from that age. You don't want to accident release classified materials. They don't go dead until 50 years after. So if you see something classified, you don't put it on the internet. You call your local government agency and say, hey, guys, I got this thing. Maybe you could, you know, not kill me and take it off my hands. Be a good citizen, you know. And put that guy up there so that, you know, I got both sides of the political spectrum. Nothing that's ITAR covered. You're not going to get a notification on whether or not something's ITAR. That means international traffic, its arms regulation. And if you ever work for a military contract, you realize that certain things are verboten. You don't give them to other countries. For instance, anything that might show like how a rocket works. That could be used for a weapon. It used to be that crypto used to be under ITAR. But, you know, not so much these days. The other one that you see is this unclassified mark. That means unclassified but not for public release. Don't release that either because even though it's not dropping classified data, if you've ever worked for the U.S. government, it's potential that you've violated your own release clauses and you might go to jail anyways. So don't do that. Storing an artifact is the other problem. You now bought something expensive and you don't want to see it destroyed over time. Also, if any of you ever come across something like this and you want to protect it, you want to know how you can put it in a shed without it deteriorating. So electronics like beer love beer temperatures. Cool, not cold, dark. Those are the things that electronics loves. We'll talk about why. The cool environment, cold, is basically because a lot of things don't do well in heat. They get destroyed over time more rapidly. Cold is an arresting thing and it's thermodynamics at the end of the day, but it's better for everything. Dark is good because some things are UV sensitive such as ROMs, displays, signage, housings, these things don't seem that important to a hacker, but they're important for historians. Not damp, not humid, but you also don't want to destroy rubber gaskets. Clean, clutter, super important, you don't want to have rats and roaches and other little bugs, so wherever it's stored you want it to be clean. And you want to treat it like evidence, and that's where the forensics side of this comes in. Anyone who does digital forensics, you've got the skill sets to do digital archaeology. You mark everything. You walk into a room, you take photos, you mark and identify everything. You want to know where it happened, how you bought it from an auction, you want to take a photo of the outside, see how everything was laid out where things were. In this laptop's case I'm going to talk about, we're talking about keycaps that were on the top keys. They were falling off as soon as I pulled the thing open. In fact, there's several taped to the outside. Unless they're labeled, you don't know where they were, so you want to get that first photo before they all fall off. Important. Keep logs, log everything you do so that people who come after you, if they know what the hell you did and where it came from. Paperwork and chain of custody are huge. This is something you talk about in evidence. You talk about who had it when, how did it get there, as few hands as possible on it. Same deal with anything that's an artifact. You want to make sure that people know where it came from, how it got there, and you want to make sure that Jimmy, who really believes in aliens, didn't get his hands on and added a bunch of data. You know? When working with a unit, try to have someone else in the room, in case you find a wristwatch in there and you're now like, well, this is part of it, but everyone else is like, that's just some random fucking Casio you found. You know? And log everything you do. Plan every action. Don't ever do anything outside the plan. That's a hard one for us because we are very free-form and anyone who breaks the computers is definitely free-form. It's what we do. But you do need to plan, this is what I'm going to do today. These are the things I'm going to do and here's how I'm going to try to do it. And if you fail, you're doing something stupid and breaking something. We all end up down a rabbit hole and get creative. You don't want to accidentally destroy something. Plan stuff out. Now we're going to talk about bit rot. Every bit is bound by thermodynamics, which means every bit will die. Everything we love, everything we believe in, will die eventually. Sorry. The lifespan of magnetic media is about five to ten years effectively. It can last about as long as 50, but don't expect it. And we're going to talk about that here in a little bit. We're going to talk about the mechanical laptops that I have. We're originally commissioned about 92 and the discs were not in good shape. You can fully expect a mechanical hard disk to fail. They suck. Cool environments do prolong life. We all remember the old knock, knock, knock trick where you put it in the freezer for a little bit and the knock of death sometimes goes away. You get enough time to pull it off. Cold environments help. If you don't spin up the disc regularly, all of the juices inside, the mechanical oils and such, capacitors, they sit stagnant and they can become a problem. Dangerous. Also, reed heads can get stuck. You never know. Lifespan of flash is a lot bigger. It says you can expect ten years safely but perfectly honest, flash is good for about a hundred years. Generally. Floating gates are going to be a problem in the end. Any flash device in the end no matter what you do. Some ROMs are UV sensitive. So if they have an exposed UV chip, you've seen them, they've got a little glass top on them and you see a chip exposed. If they're sitting in UV, they're not going to immediately go but you leave them there for, you know, three, four years and you start losing bits. Extreme heater gold is bad for them but not regular stuff that we experience. Nuclear furnaces should be avoided and do not store them in anything that takes skin off of people. They're not resilient except when you're on a rug and that's where this next bit comes from. Grounding bracelets are important when dealing with chips. I remember working as a computer engineer when I was young and I actually annihilated several old PDIP chips just by standing on a rug and static electricity was enough to blow a fuse and now you're not reading shit. Capacitors and other GUI elements, older stuff, if you have anything 50 years old or you encounter it, don't plug it in. Replace the fucking capacitors. And if you don't want to replace capacitors for whatever reason, at least disconnect them and check them first to see if they're still firing within the tolerances that you're expecting. Most people what they do is they'll actually haul them out and put the new capacitor inside the old ones so you get the same aesthetic. I restore some old radios and that's how they do it. Anything new is going to die a lot quicker than anything old. We have laptops and motherboards that die within three years because some of the caps just go that quickly. Our shit's more sensitive, it dies quicker. And when powering on thermal imaging can be super helpful. What you're seeing in this image is basically a meter and a power on the laptop much later on and you can actually see the residual heat from the power supply we attached to it. This was not stock and you can see power distribution running through one of the cables and then going nowhere. That's about a three-degree variance and it lights up like a Christmas tree. If you see something approaching a thermal shock value it's going to light up a lot faster. So this is ghetto but it will give you a pretty good idea if something's going horribly wrong and usually with enough time to pull the power. Before you get into going into the elements let's talk about physical inspection of the device. We pulled out two of them. Initially I had one a year prior to the other but this is a photo of two of them together. You can do an initial physical inspection as we talked about. You can see the fan. You can see the indicator that it's a space laptop. Velcro good indicator. You can also see set numbers which help us identify it in space. You can also see the key tabs taped to the outside that's not a good sign. The other thing you can see is the back. The back's interesting because it tells us this laptop was modified. This tells us it was a flight system. The power adapter has been changed. There's also two high density ports where the modems used to be. So if you find the back of an old 1530 standard RJ45 modem ports and the power supply was just a standard socket. Now gone. This is the front. You pop it open. Looks like a standard old 1980s laptop. Pretty cool. You've got to love the keyboard. You also see the key tabs. Key tabs are interesting. They're going to become more interesting later. You also see a little door and you flip it open. You find two Abrams sitting in there. You go high there. What's your name? You've got U26 and U25 and what that tells you is somebody didn't pull the data from the unit. You got Christmas. It's a great feeling. And you also know because it's an Abram it probably didn't die. So you pull it out. You throw it in your little universal programmer and hit the read button and you can read all the data right off. The GQs are kind of nice. They only run on Windows. And you run strings because you're hacker and you know how to read a binary the first time you see it. It's the 1980s. So you run strings and you see a copyright. Some guy from grid in 1988 he was funny. He was like, my name's Slick. So you get internet sleuth mode. Here's a photo of me in internet stock art sleuthing. And you find Timothy Slick Carlson and you send him an e-mail. Because Timothy Slick is Carlson like everyone else is on LinkedIn. And he lives in the Philippines and he's retired now. He's an awesome dude. Tim had no idea that any of it had ever been on this in space. But he knew that the government had bought him. He knew they had been used for stuff. But he was also kind of like, that's my code. But that's my code from 1988. These laptops are from like the 90s. Why the hell are they still using it? He also was like, some of your codes from Peter Norton, which we would never have used. So he's given us a pretty good idea that maybe these are not things from grid. And then he, being a hacker, starts running in DOSBox and starts telling us languages are written in. And he's a super happy guy and telling us all the information we ever wanted to know. And that's where our story about the grid being the first in space came from. He also pointed out this. There's an echo line in one of the scripts that identifies the laptop as a PGSE application ROM diagnostics utility. PGSE is payload and general support computer says it outside on the case. That's how it was advertised. Which means whoever put this thing together has custom built an app ROM for it. So it's probably not fake, right? Somebody wrote an app ROM who would do that. And there's another thing that comes up when you start researching PGSE and that's a thing called SPOC. It's obviously not a reference to Star Trek. Everyone who's ever mentioned it from the US government has very clearly said it's not a meant, it has nothing to with Star Trek. But it is the space shuttle personal onboard computer, it's a space. And the PGSE is a progenitor when they switch it over the grid case from the grid compass. And the SPOC has a marked moment in history as being the first laptop in space, being the first time they added one of the most important applications they've ever had and we'll get to that in a moment. But here you can see the Smithsonian for instance pointing out it has nothing to do with Star Trek. Here is a SPOC in a forward compartment of the orbiter. If anyone ever says orbiter, they're either from the 1980s and have a beard and worked at NASA or their comic book. According to the people who worked at grid at the time, the SPOC survived the Challenger disaster to give credit to the compasses for credit as due. They were incredibly resilient machines and they used a thing called bubble memory. So supposedly these two machines that were on the Challenger did survive. The PGSE took over the SPOC in 1988. The SPOC was very limited. It ran basically two applications. We're going to talk about one of them that we've been able to recover, but the other one's basically lost to history. The first one was a tracking application for the orbiter. The second one was basically a run book application where if they saw an error code they could type it in and get a list of what to do. It sounds ridiculous to us that this is something that would have been a problem with limited communications and no digital equipment at the time. They didn't really have an app store, but it is important to note that grid did have its own version of cloud storage in the 1980s. This is the shuttle tracking application as it was written. Before this they had to do dead reckoning, which means they had to basically look out the window and see where they were to figure out where they were over Earth. There was no other way to figure it out other than asking ground control and letting them figure out where the laptops were initially set up to run, and that's why there was usually one in the cockpit. It would identify where over Earth they were. This application is available on the URL that I posted. You can grab it and if you can get it to run, it's basically grid OS emulated running in DOS. And now that we've visually inspected the laptops, let's get on to the fun stuff. I went a little further into digging in data that's out there. I'm going to cross corroborate when you're doing digital archeology. It's not as much fun as the hacking part, but it's going to tell you important things. Supposedly this was for STS-41s. The first thing I did was pull up all the image data on STS-41. Here you can see an astronaut sleeping next to a PGSC system. It is about mid-riff to their right. None of these matched up with laptops I had. The serial numbers, if I could see them, didn't match, and there was no key tabs at all. So it's a pretty good indicator. These were not the ones I was looking for. But the PGSCs were used for a lot of stuff. Some were actually used for ground development to develop different payloads for scientific missions. Some were automated check and verify that the payload's running. One of them was used for the original GPS analysis. When they deployed the first GPS satellites, they wanted to make sure they had gotten it right, and they fired up a PGSC system, which was a great case, 1530, to connect to the first GPS data. The PGSC, interestingly, did not have an orbiter communications link. It had no internet. It was not linked to anything. It was possible to put a multiplexer in, but they didn't do that. So that gives you a pretty good scope of what these things did and what their purpose was. Now, this is a great photo. When I saw this, it was about 3 a.m., and I'm digging, and I'm finding nothing, and then I find this guy. And this is a later mission. This is STS-94. The later missions, they had better cameras. I could read the serial number on that one, I believe, is SN1073, which is the highest serial number I saw, the ones I have are SN1044 and SN1045, with references to 43 and 46 in the paperwork. I see an SN1001 in the first PGSC system that I see. That's a great case. So they made probably at least 73 great cases. What's interesting about this one, though, is if you look real careful, you can tell that a bunch of the keys in the function level have key tab tops. They have stickers on them. This one, STS-64, no key tabs, but you can also see that there's another laptop hidden underneath. You look at one of mine, those are the key tabs. Pretty important. Here you can see them again. STS-47 has the key caps, but you can also see there's no Psyac logo over the app romps. A bunch of them had Psyac logos. A bunch didn't. It seemed like the earlier units didn't have Psyac logos. Later ones did different contractor, did the after work, and changed the logos out. Here you can see a Psyac logo next to a non-Psyac logo, no key tabs, key tab. It's a later laptop. So what's interesting about the key tab ones is they're all related to Space Lab and Micro Gravity Science Laboratory. All the flights correspond to these missions. Anything related to those key tabs seem to be related to Space Lab. These systems probably didn't fly because all the Space Lab photos I could find are either SN106 units or SN1073 units. That's where I am right now just doing visual inspection. Now let's look at the paperwork that came with one of them. One of them came with a folio bunch of paperwork, the other one came with nothing. What's interesting about this particular piece of paperwork is it tells us how much these things cost, 40k. In current dollars, it's about $70,000 a thousand, so they paid about $35,000 extra dollars to have them modified for flight. They probably had about 73 of these done between 1988 and 1997. To give you an idea of cost of just this system. Also interesting here is you have a read a life history log which tells you things about dates. When was it first in the NASA receipt and that's 1992. So it's definitely not a it's definitely was reduced to a ground system in 92, vanished for two years and came back in 94 as part of space lab. You can see a full life history log that's again corresponding and you can see the modifications. 40 megabit hard disk, RS422 diagnostic PROMs, epoxy everywhere, and that RS422 connector thing tells us what one of the boards is. This was a heavy modification. It was the most odd modification inside the laptop. It's an entirely custom board that replaces the modem. This was a RS422 serial interface made by Rockwell International that interface with the space shuttle. So we're going to move the housing and get in there and actually look at some of the hardware right now. You see the APROMs, you see me trying to replace one of the batteries and turn it on, that failed. But you can also see that they modified the battery. They changed the way it interface that they could swap the battery out. That wasn't a stock modification. You see epoxy on all the chips. You can see our life logs are at 1,700 hours. The other one for about 1,500. That's a long time. This was not space shuttle use. You can also see that they had an odd and even BIOS. And you'll see that in a lot of old computers where they had like a 16-bit bus but 8-bit BIOS chips. They would put odds and evens on the memory in there. They'd be interleaved when you pulled them out. We tried to pull it out initially with a DIP 28 cable and it didn't work because their power was still attached and I didn't want to cut the power cables. So if you ever want to do this you have to cut the power and ground so you're not attempting to power the entire laptop when you're pulling the data off the chip. We lucked out, however, initially I thought they were just soldered in because of all the epoxy but they weren't. There was actually a socket board there so we were actually able to pull it out and we were able to get the BIOS off which was super important because the disk geometry information for the IDE disks was in the BIOS. The IDE disks were terrible. Conor is in Scotland and Scotland should feel ashamed forever having produced these people. This is what Tim Carlson who worked at Grid had to say about the Conors. He was, oh no, Conor peripherals. Apparently they had a problem called stickion in which the reed heads would stick on the disk and their line engineers would, you know, being the 1980s hit it with their knuckles and let it keep going. So I had high hopes for this when it actually spun up. That was not the case, however. It did spin but they were very corrupted. I needed to find an ATA card because they did not have an ability to understand LBA and anything USB throws LBA at it it immediately went just go, oh that's CSH. I know that. It starts feeding the wrong data. So we found an old ATA card managed to get GNUDD rescue to run which was the only thing that was able to apparently continually try and pull data and what we ended up pulling was about 20 megs of a 40 meg hard disk randomly spread out but enough to figure out what was on it. And it was basically MS-DOS it was running diagnostic ROM software it was called a DDSC flight mode system and inside you can see some of the strings what the interesting one on the right shows a file listing and I've been unable yet although I've only been into one laptop's disk the other one I've not been into has a thing called astro 2.bat which could be really interesting because I've never seen that one in any of the paperwork and you can see Tim Carlson again showing up all over the damn place having written all the diagnostic data for these machines. The binaries you want if you want to dig into them with me are actually on pgse.space and we're working on restoring right now a stock grid 1520 to run some of the applications but it's basically dead. One of the things we have to do is actually Dremel open a CMOS chip and hot wire it and we work on that but the next thing is replacing the display lessons learned here are that my weak ass methodology did yield results we cross corroborated between multiple sources we identified these laptops were NASA systems they were flight modified we know the time spans they operated in how long they ran we know what they did we know what applications were on there we found the guy who wrote them so all of that worked really well we also know that it's pretty unlikely these ever flew we went through all of the flight logs all the flight data on YouTube and the National Archives and could not find a serial number that would have matched that said number that was on there we also identified that the weird ass module that was in there was likely an RS-422 Rockwell interface for the space shuttle and we figured out that they were used primarily for long life testing initially they would have been the first batch that would have been tested before they went from a 711 said number to anything above that the 713 appeared to have been used initially to do shock testing in fact one of the logs in there that's not posted shows a screw that came out of one of the displays and that was a send back to grid and they responded they also did an EMI test on it this showed significant bit rot which tells us the disks don't survive that long even if they're in really good shape in this case they were flash memory was intact the easiest way to do recovery work on NASA gear is to work there I'm going to shout these guys out I worked there for a little bit there was a group called LORP which actually did Lunar Reconstance Orbiter project they recovered magnetic media from the first Lunar Reconstance Orbiter sending back they were sending back perfect copies of data but we didn't have the capacity to read that data we recorded all this data but we didn't have the equipment at the time to read it so these guys took over McDonald's and started reading all the data and found the first Earthrise photos ever taken amongst other things high resolution images of the moon used for plotting landing sites so LORP is a really cool project next to it by the way is a ICBM that they're working on restoring and by the way that's in the unsecured part if you want to do this and you don't want to go get a job at NASA there's an organization called SpaceApp Challenge which allows you to go work on their data they have huge volumes of data that nobody can do anything with because it's not indexed or searchable nobody's had to do anything with it and we're running into this glut of historical important data just being lost because there's so much of it created they get paid to do the development when they're done there's no funding to put it where it needs to be to be saved so if you have the opportunity that's one way you can contribute so this is going to be my thank you board that website is going to continue to get more data when I pull the next disks but it has most of the ROMs we've done shot testing between them so we know the ROMs are not bit rotted it has the disk images for the first one as far as we've been able to pull them they may get better over time and it has a bunch of applications and research papers it's the PGSC systems if you want to read through them including information on how the applications are written at the time they wrote entire research papers on why they used DL displays why applications were written the size that they were for tolerances and readability the irony was the space shuttle at the end of the day was can this astronaut read it computer history museum much left to them for having given me an hour and a half video of the original creators talking about it and to DEF CON goons etc and all those that I cannot remember so does anyone have any questions since we have like two minutes