Back to the Universal Translator for a moment. A key for preserving fixed
records like films and video tapes is the sampling rate. PAL and NTSC
become the same thing when sampled at frequencies much greater than
themselves. Their subtle differences were really iterations in coding
schemes designed to squeeze the most into limited bandwidth. It will all
seem horribly primitive to future generations when data rates are thousands
of times greater.
For those pesky interactive environments that are procedural rather than
fixed data records, the key is notation. If Jaron was coding for an 8 bit
processor in 1982 using some form of assembler to achieve speed, it is not
surprising that the code won't run today. However, it was Jaron who told us
in his Scientific American article years back that he would develop some
form of visual programming language (VPL came from that I believe). What is
needed is not some huge data bank that stores everybody's program verbatim
but some intelligent archivists who can extract algorithms and put them
down in a notation that anyone else can read - long after the machines used
for the "environments" have disappeared.
Tom Ditto