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Emulation For Preservation of Digital Artifacts
An anonymous reader writes "Author Salman Rushdie donated his papers and notes to Emory University a while ago. Not surprisingly, many of Rushdie's original notes, drafts, and correspondence existed in electronic form. Rather than printing them out or converting them to other formats, archivists at the university created an emulated image of Rushdie's old computer, complete with old software. Researchers visiting the archive can read his email in Eudora and his Stickies notes, or read drafts of his books in ClarisWorks. When you leave your legacy to future generations, would you like a virtualized copy of your personal system to be included?"
But it will totally mess up talking to our grandkids! They will know exactly how bad it was.
Who the hell is going to want to go through my old electronic junk? There is so little of value spaced out amongst so much cruft that it wouldn't be worth anyone's time to sort it all out.
John
How well will this sit with Apple and other copyright owners of non-free operating systems, applications, and media files that were on the decedent's drive?
cd /porn
rm -rf
Loading...
...do you still have a working ext3 driver in the future and do you want 100 gigs of tranny porn and bad PHP programs?
My ideas are not original. In fact, the idea sort of comes from various story lines from popular SciFi shows like Star Trek and SG-1. Not only should we be creating digital archives, we should be creating digital archives inside of orbital vehicles that are capable of sustaining their own orbits indefinitely. We should then beam up any and all data we can about ourselves to survive as evidence of our existence. If 2012 "end of the world as we know it" really were to happen, such digital archives in space would be at the very least pretty interesting to any beings that emerge after us or who happen along through our star system.
This would be rather like voyager but would be continually updated as time and technology progresses. Keeping it in orbit is just about the best way to preserve it whether the data storage is in our local orbit or on the moon.
Why do they need to emulate Eudora. I still use my copy every day. It runs fine under 64-bit Windows 7.
The problem is too far into the future the host you chose to emulate on may not exist either..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
When you leave your legacy to future generations, would you like a virtualized copy of your personal system to be included?
Sure, but the writing on the walls of the cell gets kind of hard to read in the corners.
Information has a shelf life: Most of the stuff on anybody's computer is really uninteresting, even to the owner of the information, and becomes more uninteresting as time passes.
Add to that the fact that a lot of the contents of any given person's computer is the same as those of everybody elses. (E.g. how many copies of windows and word would be saving if this practice was to be widespread? How many viagra and cheap mortgage offers in the junk folder of the email program?)
OK, so some of it may be historically or anthropologically interesting for coming generations, but most of it will be as disappointing as those clay tablets enumerating how many sacks of grain somebody owned 3,000 years ago. Once the challenge of cuneiform script was overcome the actual data was a big yawn. Any reason to think Rushdie's notes will be any different?
Somebody will object that this method will preserve the programs etc needed to "decode" Rushdie's stuff in the future in case the programs are lost - but what happens if the emulation technology is lost?
When my Dad died last year, I made a VM of his laptop so I could help my mom out finding documents and other things that she would need for taxes and getting everything sorted out in her name.
That is pretty much done now, but I still keep my dad's VM around. I was his tech support and I was always answering questions and sorting things out when they got messed up. He had made some funny personalizations to it (sounds and such). So even though I don't need it anymore, I still fire it up when I miss him. I even apply all the pending updates - I guess it is part of my grieving process.
Interesting idea. I don't know if its for me, per se, especially since I'm not a very prolific, writer, thinker, inventor, or all-around brilliant mind, but it is a way to leave a virtual presence postmortem.
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
We need to get the roms from pinball games and other Redemption games that still have not had there roms dumped.
But pinmame / vpinmame and visual pinball have saved most of them but the ones that we still don't have rom dumps for are some of the ones that need to be saved.
Digital Artifacts: Save The Jaggies!
I find it funny that Rushdie was a Mac user back then, and used ClarisWorks. I actually liked that package a lot, as it did about enough for most people. I just think it's funny that he used it and Eudora at about the same time that I did.
-- haaz.
When everything you've created was done in Electric Pencil on CP/M, copying the text to something more modern isn't all that difficult (providing you can read the 8" floppies). But when the works were done with obsolete software on an obsolete OS, but are something a little more sophisticated-- say the Music Construction Set on the Commodore Amiga, or the Swahili version of Wang Office, it might just be easier to emulate the hardware it ran on rather than try to figure out how to get it converted to something else...
Rushdie is an Indian-born Brit, educated at Cambridge, a winner of Booker Prize (as well as Booker of Booker). Why are his papers entrusted to Emory?
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
my journal is in flat 7-bit ASCII, a choice I deliberately made back in the '90s.
I don't expect anybody but my daughter to be interested, though.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
they're real.
that after a while the emulator platforms also become outdated, and have to be virtualized themselves. Will the next centuries see the activity of scarving through levels of virtualization to get to some digital past raising as a new archaeologic discipline?
I hold a master's degree in Library and Information Science, and I honestly believe that the only way libraries will continue to be relevant 30+ years from now is if they jump on the digital bandwagon.
Just think about all of the rare, exclusive info that's been published in the last 100 years of many of the "small time" newspapers alone!
House plans, original artist renderings, articles that were lyrical and powerful and educational all at once (because let's face it, we're about 80 years past the height of literacy in this country, people.)
Digitization is not just a good idea. It's the absolute way of the future.
--
http://www.limbocomics.com/ [limbocomics.com]
The tagline: "COMICS! HOT ACTION! (Mostly comics.) And a little ACTION!"
I doubt this archivist will know how to secure digital data against deletion by malicious hackers.
In the Commodore community, this is coming up more often as people age. Several of us have passed on recently leaving behind huge libraries of floppy disks. Even if only the disks themselves are imaged (sector-by-sector copy to a file that can be used in emulators or stored on other computers), it can be a huge undertaking.
... but the ones that we still don't have rom dumps for are some of the ones that need to be saved.
That is very profound.
Be seeing you...
KEEP (Keeping Emulation Environments Portable) will develop an Emulation Access Platform to enable accurate rendering of both static and dynamic digital objects: text, sound, and image files; multimedia documents, websites, databases, videogames etc. It's a project supported by the EU and several National Archives across Europe.
I recently implemented this exact feature for my employer's image-based backup product for Windows systems. I hesitated to post this, at the risk of sounding like a commercial, but I think it's relevant.
The product itself (ShadowProtect) makes snapshot-based backup images. The relevant feature, called VirtualBoot, can be used to immediately boot a specified backup image within a Sun VirtualBox VM, without the need to restore the backup or to convert it to any other file format (lengthy operations). There are many use cases facilitated by this feature, and data longevity is one of them.
By preserving the applications and operating system, along with the data, the data's lifespan is significantly increased, particularly when data stored in proprietary formats (where the source apps are essential in order to consume the data).
Can we hit Delete?
THIS is the saddest thing ...
This is the best thing for ever Film
They'd have to include my sticky keyboard. :)