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Futureproofing Artifacts: Spacewar! 1962 In HTML5
trebonian writes "In 1997 we posted a playable version of the Spacewar!, the first graphical computer game. Spacewar! was written by Russell et al at MIT in the early '60s. We did not re-implement the game. Rather, we found the original source code, rebuilt it to get an authentic binary and ran it on a PDP-1 emulator that we wrote in Java. We chose Java to implement the PDP-1 because we believed at the time — correctly as it turned out — that a Java version would survive the browser wars. Also, it would not require any effort to keep it running on all platforms well past the turn of the millennium, and through the traffic peaks of Spacewar's 40th and 45th birthday. It's now getting close to 15 years later. We would not want to bet that in another 15 years a Java program will still run on the latest popular platforms. As a hedge to the future, and in an effort to continue the preservation of this significant digital artifact, we've now ported the PDP-1 emulator to Javascript/HTML5. This should see the game through Spacewar!'s 50th (and hopefully 60th) birthday. Expect another update around 2025."
Open source software :)
Netcraft confirms it! Flash is dead!
Despite that 90% of the earliest net memes are still perfectly playable today due to their SWF composition, it's interesting that they're (indirectly) making the statement that html5 will beat flash. I can see why, flash is a bloated, update happy, buggy, insecure beast of a program, sort of like java through the years.
Now, if only we could force the current generation to play this for a few hours before complaining that I need to buy a PS3 because their xbox 360 isn't good enough...
Quartz Extreme and Core Image. Are there any other real reasons to spend all that money on generic hardware?
To say that JVMs won't exist for current platforms 15 years hence is a bit of a stretch, I think. On the other hand, HTML5/JavaScript (implementations, not the standard) is such a moving target that I wouldn't count on code written for it being able to run in a few years, much less a decade-and-a-half later. Still a cool hack, but the reason given is kinda lame.
I agree, I rather take my chances with a modern JVM and probably apply some fixes than have it completely broken for an unknown version of javascript and whatever the browsers of the future will think what HTML5 should look.