[SPG_Active_Members] Saving video games

[Henry Lowood]

A propos loss, there was a post on the IGDA Preservation SIG today that 
Home of the Underdogs is RIP.  I am traveling and have not had time to 
confirm, but that's a serious blow to the Abandonware community if true.

Henry

Al Kossow wrote:
>
>
>
> 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 you've tried to find them inside IBM, Grady, and they don't 
> exist. I have had some success with companies,
> especially HP, at CHM, for systems from the 80's onwards, but there 
> just isn't 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 'obsolete' 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.
>

-- 
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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