March 2021: the pandemic is underway. Everyone is a little stir-crazy, spinning up every hobby imaginable to occupy our time. A friend of mine, clearing out storage, asked if I wanted a pile of Apple parts.

For anyone that's read any of what I've written here, you already know the answer.

Along with the evidence of a mouse, or indeed mice, this pile is where this story starts.

For anyone who has never booted a machine that spent forty years in storage: watching it do the least impressive thing it's capable of - showing the boot screen, the most banal thing possible - and I sat there, grinning, like I'd witnessed a birth. If you've never experienced this, I suggest you put your computer in storage now, come back in forty years, and read this again with a fresh sense of amazement.

Also in the pile, and the reason there is a project here at all: an Apple ProFile 10, circa 1984.