This article brings back some memories of pre-Internet days. 12 years old with an NEC PC-9801, dialing up a local BBS of techies and motorcycle enthusiasts. This led to getting deep into a BBS written in Pascal, called WWIV, printing out the code (as thick as a book) and porting it to Japanese. My goodness, I just found that the project still exists! (http://www.wwivbbs.org/)

"Lost civilization" is a nice metaphor, there is certainly an archaeological aspect to these surviving artifacts.