A YouTuber digging through a used hard drive for a nostalgia project got more than old parts. He found someone else’s science homework from 2001 and a list of Doom II cheat codes.
TrashBench, owner of an experimental computer hardware channel, had been looking for vintage hardware for months because he was sick of high prices and the current trend in consumer technology.
“PC Prices Got Stupid…So I Tried Gaming Like It Was 1996”
Was the title of the video, which came out in October 2026. The journey that started with revisiting his first computer ended up becoming an online time capsule he did not delete.
It all began when TrashBench watched Need for Speed: Special Edition playing on his cousin’s computer when he was 11. That Christmas, his parents got him his first computer, back in 1996. Nearly thirty years later, the frustrations of the current price trend led him to recreate the experience.
He sourced parts from eBay, Facebook Marketplace, and thrift stores. The finished system ran a 200 MHz Intel Pentium MMX processor, 32 MB of RAM, a Sound Blaster 16 sound card, and an Epox motherboard that required manual jumpers for speed and voltage settings. Graphics began with an S3 Trio32 card before he upgraded to a Matrox Mystique 3D accelerator for about $100 after learning a period 3dfx Voodoo card could run around $1,000. Storage started with a noisy 2 GB Western Digital drive; an 80 GB unit later needed jumper limits so the old BIOS could handle it. Windows 95 went on a separate drive.
He fired up classics including Need for Speed, Duke Nukem 3D, and Microsoft Flight Simulator 98 with a period joystick.
“There’s been so many times during filming where I’ve been playing a game and just gotten lost in it for an hour,”
He said.
One used hard drive still held data from a previous owner. TrashBench found science homework dated 2001 about 25 years old by 2026 along with Doom II cheat notes and other files such as school assignments and “Holiday & Sick Days.”
“There’s some dude’s science homework on there from 2001 and his Doom 2 cheats,”
He explained. He felt uncomfortable wiping another person’s files, so he left the drive intact and installed the operating system elsewhere. Screenshots of the desktop file list circulated with coverage of the video.
In its efforts to refurbish the old computer, it becomes evident how a second-hand storage device can maintain fragments of other people’s life that have already been long forgotten by the original owners. The process is additionally fueled by a general sense of fatigue that some gamers feel due to increased prices for components and the complicated market.
