HEMISPHERESMAGAZINE.COM
•
MAY 2013
71
of websites such as GeoCities
before they’re shut down. He works
for the not-for-profit Internet Archive
(
archive.org), a huge public repository of
digital audio and film, scanned-in books
and old so ware. And he has a 40-foot
shipping container in his upstate New
York backyard filled with, among other
things, old so ware and computers.
What’s a computer historian? “We’re
not used to the idea of there being new
things to collect in the world,” Sco says.
That’s changing—in an age of iPhones
and app stores, we can hardly deny
that technology matters—so Scott is
increasingly invited to move items out
of storage and into museums. But his
most ambitious project, called JSMESS
(
jsmess.textfiles.com), is intended to
bring emulation to the masses. “We’re
working on putting an emulator in a
Web browser window that can start up
500
different types of computers,” he
says, “so that all computer history will
be as accessible to us as movies, music
and books are now.”
Some of this work is a race against
the forces of entropy. Old computer
files on floppy disks and tapes are liter-
ally rotting away. “The material is so
inherently fragile and transient that it
has no life span to speak of,” Sco says.
If it isn’t recovered soon, it might be
gone forever.
That would be a profound loss. Mod-
ern technology is so incredibly capable
that even the cheapestmoderncomputer
can compose music, store thousands of
books and photos, even paint pictures.
When you used a Commodore 64 or one
of the first Macintoshes, by comparison,
you were keenly aware of its limits:
the paucity of colors, the tiny memory,
the long time it took to load files off a
disk. You had to learn to work within
the machine’s constraints. The history
of computing is the history of human
creativity and ingenuity—which is why
we should hold on to it forever.
I asked Sco for the thing he yearns to
find, his holy grail. He answered readily:
“
theCompuServe backup tapes.” Compu-
Servewas an influential precursor to the
Internet, a network service accessible
via modem in the 1980s. For thousands
of people, it was their first experience
of using a computer to communicate; it
taught theworld that computersweren’t
just for spreadsheets. Yet those early
years of chats and discussion forums
are gone without a trace.
It’s possible, though, that Compu-
Serve exists somewhere, static and
inert, in a stack of decaying tapes. For
Sco , it’s a reason to hope. Perhaps the
backups will be discovered in a closet or
old storage cabinet and loaded up into
a new machine, so that this venerable
network can be emulated—and experi-
enced anew.
PAUL FORD
(@
ftrain) is a Brooklyn-based
writer and computer programmer who’s
investigating ways to make Web pages
scroll agonizingly slowly onto his screen.
TECH
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The history of
computing is
the history
of humankind’s
creativity and
ingenuity—
which is why
we should hold
on to it forever.
