In the early 1980s Joseph L. Bean, a retired police officer in Oakland, California, decided it would be fun to write a novel. So he sat down at the new family computer and began Partners in Blue. Bean had entertained his kids with tales of the fuzz for years, but he kept the project secret from his family. The words flowed easily, and this new way of writing—after years of using typewriters that always needed repair—sped everything along. But then Bean’s health failed, and the manuscript, though nearly finished, was pushed aside. There was no backup on disc, and no printout. For 20 years his story of crime and detection was trapped in a machine he affectionately called Herbie. The PC could be switched on, but no one could access its ancient code.

Bean’s daughter got the tip-off from her father that Herbie housed the manuscript just as the machine was heading to the dump. She was used to hearing about her father’s detective work, and now it was time to do some of her own. The family, now fluent computer users, searched the Internet for an expert in old languages. Not Aramaic. Early code.

They found a local named Sellam Ismail who said he could raise digital ghosts. Sellam is a computer archaeologist. The Delete key is his greatest challenge; lost data, his fossil. Bean’s daughter arranged a meeting.

Sellam, 33, is a longtime computer collector who still regrets selling his first machine, a Mattel Aquarius, at 14 years old. “I wanted to buy an Apple II,” he says with embarrassment. But Sellam is more than a retro trader with a fetish for vintage computers. He has a rare talent in today’s if-it’s-not-new-we-don’tfix-it world of tech support. He can make dead machines speak.

Like an Etruscan expert sequencing pottery, Sellam knows which operating system is likely to breathe life into an old computer. He uses languages no longer spoken in computer stores, labs, or cubes, dating back as far as the 1960s.

As an archaeologist in my native England, I’ve been studying the computer artifacts piling up in a rapidly changing industry. In 2000, I heard Sellam’s name mentioned admiringly while visiting Intel’s 70,000-artifact in-house museum during a research trip to America. I contacted him, and he offered to take me on a tour of Silicon Valley’s computer graveyards, signing his email “International Man of Intrigue and Danger.”

On our tour, Sellam showed me what the long-soaring technology industry obviously wants to forget. We walked through vast storehouses where the shadows fell hard on last year’s (or decade’s) models. Some of these computers rely on outdated technology. Some are doubly orphaned: relics of defunct corporations, like Digital Equipment Corporation, taken over by Compaq, now merged with HP. We visited the Computer History Museum in Mountain View—an almost holy place for Sellam— at the time a series of Portacabins housing massive, tape-based machines dating back to the earliest days of computing.

Sellam began collecting as a teenager in the ’80s, just as personal computers hit the mass market. Passionate about the history of technology, he recognized that the hardware and software he was using as a programmer was on a light-speed course from the cutting edge to the trash bin. By age 30 he owned more than 1,000 computers that he kept stored in a former car plant in Oakland—the cobwebbed windows throwing musty light on his trove of computer-code pictures, make-yourown PC kits, and Home Brew Club memorabilia.

And he wasn’t alone. In 1996, he founded the thrice-yearly Vintage Computer Festival. There, and on its accompanying Web site, www.vintage.org, he met like-minded Commodore Pet lovers, ZX80 aficionados, and those who thrill to laptops the size of tabletops. For years the collectors swapped stories and tools while the rest of the world paid little attention.

Sellam was just a programmer who restored old equipment for fun. But then word of his collection spread. “I began to be called in by attorneys working on patent infringement cases,” he says. “I’d loan out vintage hardware that would end up being used as the smoking gun to win court cases.” Then he began helping friends, and friends of friends, with outmoded machinery. Computer salvagers have an edge on today’s fast-trained fleets of 24-hour tech support. Often they've helped design the machines they now collect. Sellam’s passion for obsolescence started to pay.

Today Sellam has a dedicated warehouse and an expanding festival, and he runs a consulting company, Vintage Tech, with his wife. He advises clients around the world on safe storage problems, on the upgrades that lock up data, and on the everyday tech hazards forced on consumers by accelerating product churn. He once resurrected data on an obsolete system for a NASA space-shuttle contractor and simply emailed it back to the client as a text document. His fees depend on the relative obscurity of the media involved. A common PC floppy disk costs $5 and rare disk packs can be up to $100. A typical job costs $150 to $300.

But it’s the house calls where Sellam really hits pay dirt. He’s discovered everything from a canyon of DEC mainframes stored among the scented pines of Malibu to cars filled with computers in Santa Barbara. And the resale value of his finds makes it all worthwhile. A Japanese collector bought an Apple I at the VCF for $25,000. It now sits, encased in Plexiglas, in a hotel lobby in Tokyo. Sellam’s trade has spread worldwide. There’s now a VCF Europa, where collectors give one another PowerPoint presentations of prized specimens in a hall adorned with mounted stag-heads and Bavarian folk history.