I know a guy who keeps a DEC PDP-12 in his basement. The thing pulls about 25 kW, so he doesn’t turn it on very often.
“Amiga was once a top-of-the-line machine—a successor to the Commodore 64.”
As I recall, the Amiga was Atari. The Commodore 64 was not.
There are many geeks that revel in maintaining old hardware.
IMO there will always be a way to read old media. And once it is transferred to more stable media and backed up multiple times it is essentially eternal.
What is really sad is all the old 35mm silent films on nitrate stock that have disintegrated :-(
The Library of Congress required that films be submitted as paper copies..each frame on a strip of photo paper. In many instances old films have been painstakingly restored from these paper copies.
M4L ‘history’
Digital data may not degrade, but much of it is encrypted using long-forgotten passwords.
I have noticed that on Star Trek and other sci fi movies of that period and newer often have mention of “tapes” in hundreds or thousands of years in the future when we already have gone away from them.
Speaking of copyright, I once owned broadcast copies of the original New Coke commercials. Long after Coca-Cola dropped the product.
I made the mistake of bringing them to the attention of a Coca-Cola Bottling exec.
Didn’t even get a thank you. Wonder what that could be worth to a collector.
I have an Amiga, and a bunch of floppys filled with work. I need to try and boot her up.
Dear God, let it die.
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A very interesting topic for discussion.
We will always be playing ‘catch-up’. Battling against time, nature, and obsolescence(among other things).
We need to completely revamp copyright. Much material has already been lost due to the insane length of today’s copyright law. A return to the origional 14 year term with a maximum of obe 14 year renewalnwould be optimal, but with media companies purchasing the best congress koney can buy, I wouldnt hold my breath.
The great irony of The Information Age is nothing will be remembered.
Meanwhile, the history on Hillary’s server and the IRS emails are erased and no one bothers a whit.
Some of the issues in this thread remind me of a similar issue with software. Back in 1999 I was approached by a client of a client for whom I had written software years before. One of the “plugins” I had used for the compiler with which I designed their software had a Y2K bug. I had the source code, but putting together a programming platform was hard, because I had to find all of the plugins originally used to make the thing in the first place. Then I had to update the DateTimePicker plugin I had used, which was the source of the bug.