So, 2026 comes around. I'm building a new workshop, moving old things out of storage, sorting stuff, picking up old projects along the way.

And this is really the first time I spent any time at all looking at what was actually *in* that hard drive image.

The ProFile itself has failed; a capacitor on its logic board is probably shorted, and that's now another future problem. And the interface card needs its own repair saga... this story isn't about the hardware any more from this point on. It's about a hard drive image.

This is where I need to make a deal with you, the reader.

I can't prove where this drive came from; its provenance is lost. I can prove that it has run. I have evidence that I sucked out its contents. And here is the deal: if we accept that this hard drive image came out of Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, then everything else follows with the evidence. 

So let me introduce the protagonist of this dissertion: Louise Ursula Albright, a high school mathemetics teacher who also taught "computers," and an apparent hater of Pascal. And I mean, who isn't? She's in good company.

The first look through the hard drive contents was underwhelming. AppleWorks, Copy II Plus, very normal stuff. A directory of obvious assembly code files for Merlin-8. Nothing that would make me want to spend time looking at the contents.

But digging in to the image a little deeper with my wozit utility, part of my wozzle library, I found that the image was at least slightly corrupted. Which lead to a multi-day effort of extracting, correcting, sorting and filing.

The first file that really caught my eye was an AppleWorks spreadsheet that ended with the words, "The Buick can wait."

Pricing the ProFile against a car - not a woman of unlimited means, but certainly one who means to do what she wants. I like her already.

A tithe is traditionally 10% of one's salary. That's what this drive cost her, near enough; and I'm aware that I'm about to propose something of faith to an audience where my average reader might own more computers than they do chairs.

We all tithe. Maybe we don't call it that, and some more than others; the results of our tithes just tend to arrive in boxes.

Yes, Ms. Albright and I share a set of beliefs that might as well be a religion.