[SPG_Active_Members] Saving video games

[Al Kossow]

On 2/12/09 10:33 AM, "Henry Lowood" <lowood at stanford.edu> wrote:

We've had less success with commercial titles

--

That is the understatement of the century.

Between active destruction and lack of interest, very few sources survive
from the first twenty years of computing.
I know you¹ve tried to find them inside IBM, Grady, and they don¹t exist. I
have had some success with companies,
especially HP, at CHM, for systems from the 80¹s onwards, but there just
isn¹t much out there from earlier systems.
We get lucky some time, as was the case with a donor from Kansas City that
had the SDS 900 series software which
was given to them by Honeywell, but in most cases as companies merged or
were downsized, the Œobsolete¹ code
went into the dumpster.

This is the most frustrating part of my job.. Trying to ferret out what
still exists and then trying to read and preserve it
knowing how important this effort is given how little there is, and how
ambivalent the computing world is on the subject.

I am on the MAME development list, and posted there that I find it very sad
that we will be able to run most arcade games
that have a microprocessor, but not the code that ran on mainframes or
supercomputers.


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