u/Erable_Rouge

I'm sharing some photos of my brand new, sealed box of Windows 95 (for PCs without Windows), Canadian French version.

I'm in Quebec City, and between 2018 and 2019, I took a computer support course at a vocational training center. During my last week of classes, my instructor said he wanted to completely renovate the classroom for the following year (this was in September 2019, and spoiler alert: there was no start of classes the following year 🌎💉😷).

There were metal shelves that had been placed against the wall, and he decided to move them. Behind these shelves was a door that led to a closet.

Looking inside, he exclaimed that it was nothing but old junk, so he emptied the cupboard, throwing everything on the floor and saying that anyone who wanted it could help themselves since it was going in the trash anyway. That's when I saw this box with another package containing a manual and some sealed MS-DOS floppy disks.

These are priceless fragments of computer history, so I rushed to retrieve them. We learned that this cupboard had been sealed in 1996, filled with computer equipment dating from the early 1980s to the mid-1990s. There wasn't a speck of dust inside.

Given the condition of the box, the complete absence of any signs of aging, and especially its preservation in an environment with constant humidity and temperature, it's practically a museum piece.

(Warning: This is fucking long)

Hello everyone,

As I mentioned in a previous post, my beloved DS Lite has a rather unique history.

I received it as a Christmas gift in 2006, the year it was released in Europe (I was 11 years old and living in France at the time).

However, most likely due to a rather intense surge of testosterone during puberty, I had a pretty aggressive gaming style, and I remember slamming it down extremely violently after losing a Mario Kart game. The result? When I turned on the console, the lights came on and the sound appeared, but there was no display on either the top screen or the touchscreen, just black screens.

So I begged my father to send it to Nintendo support to be repaired (this was around 2007-2008).

A few weeks or months later, I received a Nintendo DS which, over time, turned out to be a replacement model. However, this model was far too pristine, far too clean, and looked far too new to have come from a refurbished console, so I strongly suspect that Nintendo France support sent me a brand new console (just the console itself, no box, no packaging; they were in the middle of peak production of the DS, so that seems logical).

Therefore, we can consider my console to date from 2007 or 2008.

This extremely hardcore style of gaming taught me a valuable lesson, and since then I've bought it a protective case and taken extremely good care of it.

However, plot twist: I decided to immigrate to Canada in 2014, and I saw my DS for the last time in 2015 during a short stay in France.

I didn't know it yet, but that was the last time I would see it for 10 years.

Over time, particularly towards the end of 2018, I started wondering where my console had gone, as I had decided to bring all my Nintendo consoles and games back home to Canada.

I found my entire collection intact, except for my DS, which was completely missing. So, I resigned myself to reporting it lost in the early 2020s...

However, in a new plot twist, in 2021 my father told me he had seen it somewhere, though he couldn't pinpoint its exact location. This was convenient, as I was due to visit France at that time, but after turning my old room and part of the entire house upside down, I still couldn't find it.

My father finally decided to move, settling in an old farmhouse in Lorraine, where winter temperatures can easily drop to -10 to -15 degrees Celsius. For me, my console was definitely lost, even though there was still a glimmer of hope because my father had spotted it a few years earlier.

Then, at the end of 2024 or the beginning of 2025, my father told me he'd found it along with my brother's DS, plugged it in to see if it worked, and then put it away in his mess. It was perfect timing, because I had to go back to France to take care of some paperwork at the end of 2025.

And then, the reunion! He pulled my DS out of his mess and gave it to me!!! 🙌

He also revealed where it had been hiding all this time: it was in a DS leather case, which was itself inside a cardboard box, which was then inside a plastic bin. He told me that this plastic bin had been stored in the barn, which was missing half its roof and had no insulation whatsoever... FOR 5 YEARS (actually, ever since he moved).

In total, it spent 10 years uncharged, including 5 years in a plastic bin outside, surviving 5 consecutive winters...

Back in Canada, I recharged it, removed the plastic protective case, cleaned it, and it's absolutely like new, just as I left it in 2015.

To test the battery, I decided to run a battery life test at minimum brightness, without any games, displaying only the DS home screen.

I fully charged it to 100% and waited.

IT LASTS FOR 15 HOURS AND 1 MINUTE BEFORE THE LIGHT TURNED SOLID RED (I have a screenshot of the timer).

In short, it's the kind of game console that defines an era, defines a childhood, and leaves its mark on all the generations that came before the first generation (those born after 2010). I might be getting ahead of myself, but I consider this console to be part of the shared culture of Generation Y and part of Generation Z.

So, that was its incredible story.