I just found this from 2004, while e-housekeeping:

Out With A Bang Foundation - for old dying people who don’t want to wither away. They get to do something spectacularly dangerous as their last act. With a minimum 95% chance of death, they’ll get into the history books, and go out with a bang.

Come on venture capitalists, there’s a free idea going here!

Continuing the data-archaeology theme, I found a file called ancient.zip, which seems to hold some incredibly interesting Amiga files from when I was very young. There are home-made OctaMED modules, Deluxe Paint IFFs, AMOS scripts, and some text files. I’d love to get into this file, but it’s password protected.

FCrackZip is a Free (GPL 2.0) zip password cracker, and it’s fast. My Athlon 3500+ (2.2Ghz, 512KB cache) took about 5 minutes to check all lower-case-alpha+numeric passwords of length 6. That’s 2.1 billion possible passwords - not bad. However, this file is from an era when I was in the habit of using ridiculously long passwords, which is probably why I’ve forgotten this one. If so, it’ll never be found, but if the password is actually of a reasonable length, how long might the crack take?

Assuming the password is only 12 digits long (which I have reason to believe is true), it will take 23,854 years. If I waited 2 years for Moore’s Law to double the power of my CPU, it would only take 11,927 years. If I waited 4 years, it would take only 5,964 years. Generalising, there’s no point starting a calculation which will last longer than 4 years. Instead, you’re better off spending 2 years doing something else, then performing the same calculation on Moore-enhanced hardware which will take the remaining two years. So you’ve waited 4 years for the answer to a 4-year calculation, but only done 2 years of actual computing.

This all means there’s no point me starting cracking until after 2036. It might be quicker to locate the original Amiga floppies and try booting up the old A1200.