...on a 2-day-old article? Malfunction or sign of new ownership? Or some warm confection of the two..?

Agreed, restore check is essential, whatever the backup method, and my employer offers that as a managed service. But it's also hard to convince a non-technical, small business client to invest in best practice, unless they've already experienced a disaster first hand...

I'm a fan of tape backup when managed responsibly, but there's a fallacy that goes with recommending tape for backups: because you can train semitechnical users to dutifully change tapes and carry them offsite (e.g. on a bank run to a safe deposit box), tape gets recommended for businesses who don't have dedicated IT. But the duty of of maintaining the backup gets delegated from the original trained user, and changing the tapes becomes the whole of the backup maintenance: no one actually verifies that the backup job is running properly. I've been on calls to clients who've diligently changes their tapes nightly, but the backup software has been crashed for months...

Again, down to an actual game.

You're railing at Soulskill, but if you follow TFL down to an actual game you'll see the that they're referring to JSMESS (right or wrong) as the emulator used on the page itself...

The first contact with the Internet that I ever had was command line FTP, and not a month goes by without having to resort to it again, usually because of firewall/browser incompatibility at a client's office (a lot of HP driver downloads are still over FTP)...

+1 for the parent.

As a color, this is called fuligin (from Gene Wolde's New Sun series).

AKA carbonated beverages.

Raw Spirit is Iain's romp across Scotland in search of the "perfect dram" of Scotch whisky. Fun read, and worth it for the pronunciation guide at the back (don't assume you know how to pronounce "Bowmore")...