The Wayback Machine had saved it. Not the final version, but the version from last Sunday. He had lost only six days of work, not eighteen months.
Sheldon did not cry. Crying was inefficient. But he did sit in the dark laundry room for forty-seven minutes, breathing in the scent of dryer sheets and mourning the loss of 1.7 million keystrokes. internet archive young sheldon
That’s when Missy, who had been watching him from the doorway, spoke. The Wayback Machine had saved it
Twenty-five years later, a grown-up Sheldon Cooper would donate his first major research grant to the Internet Archive. In the donation note, he wrote simply: Sheldon did not cry
He then set up an automatic, triple-redundant, off-site, cloud-plus-tape backup system. And he never lost a single byte again.
“The encyclopedia CD-ROM is scratched,” Sheldon muttered.
But his pièce de résistance was Young Sheldon —a fictionalized version of his own childhood that wouldn’t air for another three decades. In a fit of premonitory irritation, he had mapped every inconsistency between the “TV him” and the “real him.” (Example: “I would never wear that shade of argyle. Ever.”)