<HTML> <HEAD> <TITLE>Re: [SPG_Active_Members] Saving video games</TITLE> </HEAD> <BODY> On 2/12/09 10:33 AM, "Henry Lowood" <lowood@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. </BODY> </HTML>