Claude Code is revolutionizing digital archaeology. Enterprise better dig it

OPINION The UK's National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park (TNMoC) is a natural center of digital archaeology. It has restored, recreated, and documented landmark machines, from the wartime Colossus computer through to British mainframes of the '60s and '70s. Its collection from the dawn of the microprocessor age also attracts those who live to investigate such things. LLMs, still in their metaphorical diapers, might not sound like a good fit for the hallowed huts. But boy, are they ever.

TNMoC has a YouTube channel, and puts out guest talks from anyone with something interesting to say about industry history. These include subspecies of retro geek who reverse-engineer long-abandoned systems, chips, and backwaters of digital history. They thoroughly deserve the sobriquet of digital archaeologists, as they display the profession's expected love of the obscure and the skills required to understand it properly. Their talks bear comparison with reverse-engineering presentations at DEF CON and Black Hat, peeling back layer after layer of mystery to reveal something unlikely ever to affect most of us.

Of late, the TNMoC digital archaeology talks have rather suddenly sprouted a new theme – LLMs demonstrating surprising prowess in the art and science of rebuilding the past. One such was bringing Inmos Transputer systems back to life by designing an accelerator for the Acorn Archimedes, the first Arm-based computer. Retro's like that.

Transputers were a 1980s UK effort to commercialize low-cost parallel processing. Programmed using their own brain-mangling specialist language, occam, Transputers were unparalleled if you understood how they worked and had a parallelizable task you could occam. Almost nobody did, and the technology was swept away by the time of the Pentium. There isn't much information available about the systems. Phil Pemberton, who designed the accelerator and gave the talk, admitted that he struggled to get his head around occam and doubted many users could have managed without high-level support from Inmos. But Claude Code could, getting his software working.

An even more impressive Claude-powered reverse engineering effort, if marginally less obscure, was the disassembly and annotation of Acorn's 6502-based Network Filing System, NFS. This required a deep understanding not only of the code, but of Econet's LAN hardware and software – developed around 1980, before Ethernet became commonplace on microcomputers – plus much of the host hardware and software. The motivation was to write an Econet game, of which very few exist. Creator Rob Smallshire described the undertaking as a project of "infinite scope and no budget." Retro's like that – and it's not alone. 

The result is an impeccably structured and commented series of source code files, much better than ever existed before. The full story of how that came about is complex and absorbing, but boils down to Claude Code running and debugging emulators, spotting mismatches with chip datasheets, interpreting circuit diagrams and handbooks, simulating machine states, absorbing control flow graphs, and more.

This resembles the way an expert human reverse engineer works and, in the right hands, Claude Code appears to deliver a dramatic increase in efficiency without sacrificing quality. A ROM can be processed in a day, fully commented, even to the point of Claude Code saying "Oh, that's clever" of particularly notable bits. "As a big AI skeptic, it just blew my mind," said a voice from the audience. TNMoC audiences are hardcore.

This is not simply retro geekery; it is true digital archaeology with true modern implications. There's plenty of precedent. Forensic science owes a great deal to archaeology, such as excavation methodology, taphonomy – the study of what happens to organic remains after death – osteology, and the analysis of mass graves and conflict sites. Paleoclimatology informs modern climate science. And if you want near-infinite examples of how history has valuable lessons for every aspect of the modern day, just ask a historian. Best get comfortable first, though.

There is an exact parallel here between digital archaeology and the forensic analysis of the contemporary crime scenes found in so many enterprises. It seems cheaper at the time to patch and wrap old systems to work in new environments than to go through the cost, disruption, and risk of rebuilding from scratch. People move on and documentation, such as there is, is lost, even as projects stay in place. Anyone with a few years in the engine rooms of corporate IT will know the right things to do to responsibly evolve and the many reasons why the wrong thing happens anyway. When migration, merger, reorg, or a new C-suite broom arrives, the skeletons come dancing out of the servers.

Now, it seems, there are new ways to keep dem dry bones under control. A technology that can put flesh on the fossils of systems that vanished in the days of dial-up should have plenty to say about more recent antiques, for which far more code and documentation survives. As the digital archaeologists have shown, it's not a zero-effort magic wand. "Here's our server map, document it and tell me what to do" is an incantation for slop. Work with it with logic, reason, and iteration, though, and you'll be able to build the legacy system encyclopedia everyone needs and nobody has.

Given enough context, LLMs are very good indeed at filling gaps, to the extent that critical, skeptical experts are regularly surprised and gratified by the results. They know what to do and what a right answer looks like, and thus can provide the context for the model to do the hard work. In the case of badly documented, poorly understood, and generally mysterious digital technology, we have the proof of concept that LLMs cut the mustard. 

You still need the skills and experience to make this fly. Don't wait for a deadline or a crisis: crack open a CLI and start experimenting on the ugliest monster in your life. Take care over security – mixing LLMs with corporate secrets is a live-fire exercise – and make sure anyone who might be unpleasantly surprised by what you find is in the loop. You can't prompt an LLM not to embarrass your boss, that's still up to you. If you are the boss, have at it. 

Not everyone is on the retro train. Steve Furber, co-creator of the BBC Micro and the Arm processor, has said he can't see the point of old computers because new ones are so much better. As he's spent his latter years designing million-core artificial brains, he has a point. But anyone who must keep alive that which should be dead – or put it out of everyone's misery – should watch what the older generation is doing with the corpses in its labs. It can be… electrifying. ®