[SPG_Active_Members] Your letter of 29th July

[Henry Lowood]

Dear Len,

I'm going to hijack the thread and ask you a question about the 
conversation you are having with Apple.   Has the issue of cultural 
repositories having access to Apple II ROMs come up?  In our 
preservation efforts as part of the Preserving Virtual Worlds project, 
we are encountering the problem that legal Apple emulators that are 
available require the customer to acquire ROMs separately, which Apple 
has not made available.  

We can take this off-line or to another thread.   I have some follow-up 
questions.

Best,

Henry (the other Henry)

Len Shustek wrote:
> I'm sorry you feel that way, Henry.  We do, in fact, invest 
> considerable effort in preserving software.  I think we are the only 
> institution in the world to have a full time software curator on 
> staff.  We have collected many gigabytes of code, and hundreds of 
> thousands of pages of documents.  I am personally involved in working 
> with companies like IBM and Apple to release restrictions on source 
> code so that we may make them publicly accessible, and in getting them 
> to help us find software that has been "lost".  We do oral histories 
> of software pioneers.  We have experimented with an exhibit on 
> software ("Mastering the Game: A History of Computer Chess"). We are 
> including the software story in the big exhibit we are working on.  We 
> have inducted software innovators as Fellows of the museum.
>
> I think we are doing our part.  There is certainly more that could be 
> done.  I'm sorry you think our efforts are insufficient. I look 
> forward to welcoming you back as a member when you wish to help us 
> make progress.
>
> Regards,
> Len Shustek
> Chairman, Computer History Museum
>
>
>
> At 09:43 AM 8/21/2009, Henry Gladney wrote:
>> Thank you very much for your invitation to renew my CHM membership.
>>
>> I regret having to inform you that, for the time being at least, I 
>> will not renew.
>>
>> This is because I am disappointed that CHM some time ago quit 
>> credible interest in preserving software, which I regard as of 
>> commensurate importance to the areas that it is investing in.  This 
>> happened notwithstanding the fact that there are clear ways of 
>> achieving this relatively inexpensively and the efforts of the 
>> now-suspended volunteer Software Preservation Group.
>>
>> I will reconsider membership if/when this policy decision is reviewed 
>> and CHM displays plausible interest and promising activity in the 
>> area.  I trust that you will inform me if and when this happens.
>>
>> Best wishes, Henry
>>
>> H.M. Gladney, Ph.D.     http://home.pacbell.net/hgladney/   (408)867-3933
>> _______________________________________________
>> SCC_active mailing list
>> SCC_active at computerhistory.org
>> http://mail.computerhistory.org/mailman/listinfo/scc_active 
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>
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-- 
Henry Lowood
Curator for History of Science & Technology Collections;
     Film & Media Collections
HRG, Green Library
557 Escondido Mall, Stanford University Libraries
Stanford CA 94305-6004 USA
http://www.stanford.edu/~lowood
lowood at stanford.edu; 650-723-4602

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