I miss them. Every time I buy a
computer, I set up special so ware
that lets me run old computers
inside the new one. My shiny new
Mac can, with some tricks, be
made to think that it’s a dumpy
old Commodore 64 (even though
it has 125,000 times the capacity) or
that it can run Windows 95.
This process is called “emula-
tion.” Emulators are software
programs that pretend to be
hardware—sometimes down to
the sounds that old computers
would make when you inserted
a floppy disk (though here it’s
not a real floppy disk but a fake,
so ware floppy disk). Most emula-
tors are free, created by hobbyists
who simplywant to preserve com-
puter history.
Itmay seemthat computers are
too new to have much history, but
the technology industrymoves so
fast—and computers themselves
are so fragile—that awholemove-
ment has arisen to capture our
digital past before it disappears.
The Computer History Museum
in Mountain View, Calif., and
the National Museum of
Computing in Bletch-
ley Park, England, are
among the official conser-
vators of old technology. Other,
less official groups have a differ-
ent mandate: to capture as much
computer history as possible (the
beeps, the boops, even the hard-
drive crashes) and get it into the
hands of the people.
In JasonSco ’s case, thatmeans
all the people. Sco is a computer
historian—part activist, part ring-
master, part archivist. He leads
ad hoc Internet organizations
such as Archive Team, which
makes backup copies
HEMISPHERESMAGAZINE.COM
•
MAY 2013
•
ILLUSTRATION BY BRIAN STAUFFER
69
TECH
STILL LIFE
WITHEMULATOR
COMPUTER HISTORY GETS A REBOOT
BY PAUL FORD
It’s a cruel fact that computers die and must be
replaced. Out to pasture goes the slow, boxymachine,
and in comes a new one, speedy and sleek. What
be er word is there than “upgrade”? (Good enough
for Beyoncé to title a song “Upgrade U.”) And it’s not
as if anyone actually misses old computers, is it?
I
