Comment by mmooss
2 months ago
It's not just computers. The movie industry has been the same, and that is an artistic field - there's little obsolescence: Afiak there's no system to preserve films.
Even essential films are lost; some burn up in fires; only some private groups have tried to save and restore the most important ones. For example, I read about one legendary American silent film thought lost forever and then was found somewhere in Spain, in a library IIRC (they had to translate the Spanish titles back to English).
It happens in music and other fields. Perhaps the artists and businesses are focused on the present, not seeing their work as historic, and move on to the next thing. What happens to old projects you work on - do you preserve them carefully or are they just kind of left in whatever state they were at the end?
I listened to an interview with the woman who was at the time I believe overseeing the efforts of the Audio Engineering Society to address the problem of the countless recordings made on proprietary digital audio tape machines like the Sony PCM-3348. The total number of those machines that were ever built was small since so few studios could afford them, but they were major studios and thus the masters of many of the most culturally significant albums are on tapes in that format.
She mentioned that even if you could find one of the machines that was working, keeping it running required routine maintenance and that they were down to essentially one guy who was nearing the age of retirement who had the skill and parts to keep one running. So they were in a race against time to figure out which masters to convert.
The problem gets even more thorny for sessions that were recorded using software like ProTools, which has been around in some form or another for almost 40 years, has gone through countless revisions of project file formats, and has a complicated relationship with specialty audio hardware and software plugins.
It seems like there's a general awareness of the problem now and good studios are taking some measures to archive sessions in ways that allow them to be imported in the future, but in the meantime there are two decade's worth of recordings at risk, even if their media hasn't been lost or corrupted. I guess if nothing else its a cool opportunity for people who like to hack on systems of this type though.
All of the recording I did for my friends back in college is stuck in Nuendo/Cubase projects with a bunch of long-obsolete plugins used for mixing and mastering. Going forward I'm going to print every individual track to PCM so that I have a "digital tape" of the entire session to avoid this problem.
FWIW, I've got backups of stuff from the 80's and early 90's. Would have to be transliterated into new languages or versions of languages but the stuff's been copied from medium to medium so as to remain readable. But it's not my stuff that's important - would have been amazing seeing what the MIT hackers did (as they created hacking) or the Bell Lab people, etc. There's bazillion lines (and who knows how many star trek or 4x4x4 tictactoe games) in BASIC out there :-).
Hell, perhaps it's good it's "forgotten" as it's what's powering the latest versions of Windows and other proprietary O/S.
You can emulate ITS for the PDP10 today under simh-classic which is 'culture' from the MIT frozen in time, from TECO Emacs to Dungeon/Zork and early networking.
https://github.com/PDP-10/its
On Basic, there's the games example -Basic Computer Games- made into a repo at GitHub, and some people are recreating those in modern languages as it's a trivial task (I'm doing ports myself to JimTCL).
https://github.com/GReaperEx/bcg
You can actually use any language, even sh, but for these cases JimTCL it's ridiculously easy to use.
The movie industry is also hurt due to copyright too. For some shows, all licenses copies were lost, but copies still exist (like, VHS recordings).
If it were legal and simple to keep copies of movies at home, a lot less would have ever been at risk of being lost.