"It’s going to take a minute," Sarah said, checking the network traffic.

He tried third-party sites. "macOS High Sierra download dmg," he typed. The results were a graveyard of broken links, forum posts from 2018, and shadowy file-hosting services that demanded credit card details for "high-speed access." One site offered the OS in .exe format, which made him laugh bitterly before he closed the tab.

"This feels like archaeology," Sarah mused. "Digging up old code to read older data."