Tom's point is already an issue in the realm of video arcade games. With
their highly proprietary systems and ROMs many early games like
Bushnell's Computer Space are museum pieces (we have one in our
collection). The "intelligent archivists" in this field are those
writing emulators to run the experience of the arcade game on PCs and
Macs without the surrounding furniture. Perhaps emulator research will
have to be a part of the data archiving process?
Ed Earle
Director of Collections
American Museum of the Moving Image
Astoria, NY
-----Original Message-----
From: Tom Ditto
Sent: Thursday, February 19, 1998 2:01 PM
Subject: ditto
Jaron and Steward will remember me as Tom DeWitt, but I changed
my name
when I married Bev Botto. Our little Ditto is now 15 months old.
The
monikor seems appropriate for this discussion group which I
stumbled into
while looking for links to Brian Eno.
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