I wrote a Prime minicomputer emulator some years ago and put it online (telnet em.prirun.com 8001). The Prime was a minicomputer from the 80's. I worked with Primes for many years and also worked at the company as an OS specialist for 18 months.
Seven versions of the Primos operating system, from rev 18 to rev 24, have been recovered from disks, 9-track tapes, and 8mm backup tapes. The company died around 1992.
There has been a huge amount of Prime software that as far as I know, is lost to time. Oracle ran on it. SPSS. A native DBMS. Every one of the major OS revs had 5-10 minor revs. Some software products are only available for certain revs. I actually used rev 12, so at least half of the OS versions are completely missing. And Prime released source for their products. Most of that is missing.
For me personally, the emulator was / is a very rewarding project, and maybe for a handful of others who are still alive and used Primes in high school, college, or work. It's been really fascinating to "relive" my Prime days now and then, and others have made similar comments.
But how valuable is it really? Is it more than just a curiosity now? Sure, for a current or future computer historian, it might be viewed as a gold mine, but as time goes on, it has less and less value IMO, especially as the people who actual used one die off. If in a few years, only 10 people in the world care about such a thing, does it make sense to save it for all time? I have my doubts. And if I did have all of the versions of Primos, and all of the software ever written for Primes, would it make a difference even now, when there are people alive who actually used this computer system? Also seems doubtful.
To me, an "archive everything and let someone else figure out if it's useful" strategy seems impractical. If I had my choice, sure, I'd like to have every major version of the OS and all of the products for each version. But all of the dot-revs too? Nope - not important. Would I like all of the manuals? Yep!
Some of the products like Oracle, DBMS, etc. were a bitch to configure back in the day, and certainly would be even harder now with very few people around to help. So even if I did have them, I doubt I could get them running. And even if they were running, they were a specialty product at the time, with few experts, so finding someone today that would be interested in them would be a needle / haystack thing.
It all reminds me of family pictures. Before my grandma died, she went through a large box of B/W photos, explaining to us who all the people were, and we wrote on the back of the photos. But just 3 generations after her, the generation after me, no one knows the people in the photos (except my mom is in some - their grandma). In a way it seems that this family history is somehow important, but no one younger than me is interested at all. And truthfully, I never look at the pictures myself. I ended up scanning the photos with my mom or grandma, putting them on a digital picture frame for my nephews, and leaving the rest out. I asked them first - they didn't care about any of the others.
I'm not an archivist, but it seems to me that curation is a much more important aspect than grabbing everything and keeping it alive forever. Not curating seems like a "scale to infinity" problem. Those tend to not end well.
I think the IA is great project and am not intending to be critical, but giving my own perspective about preserving some very small piece of computer history.
Seven versions of the Primos operating system, from rev 18 to rev 24, have been recovered from disks, 9-track tapes, and 8mm backup tapes. The company died around 1992.
There has been a huge amount of Prime software that as far as I know, is lost to time. Oracle ran on it. SPSS. A native DBMS. Every one of the major OS revs had 5-10 minor revs. Some software products are only available for certain revs. I actually used rev 12, so at least half of the OS versions are completely missing. And Prime released source for their products. Most of that is missing.
For me personally, the emulator was / is a very rewarding project, and maybe for a handful of others who are still alive and used Primes in high school, college, or work. It's been really fascinating to "relive" my Prime days now and then, and others have made similar comments.
But how valuable is it really? Is it more than just a curiosity now? Sure, for a current or future computer historian, it might be viewed as a gold mine, but as time goes on, it has less and less value IMO, especially as the people who actual used one die off. If in a few years, only 10 people in the world care about such a thing, does it make sense to save it for all time? I have my doubts. And if I did have all of the versions of Primos, and all of the software ever written for Primes, would it make a difference even now, when there are people alive who actually used this computer system? Also seems doubtful.
To me, an "archive everything and let someone else figure out if it's useful" strategy seems impractical. If I had my choice, sure, I'd like to have every major version of the OS and all of the products for each version. But all of the dot-revs too? Nope - not important. Would I like all of the manuals? Yep!
Some of the products like Oracle, DBMS, etc. were a bitch to configure back in the day, and certainly would be even harder now with very few people around to help. So even if I did have them, I doubt I could get them running. And even if they were running, they were a specialty product at the time, with few experts, so finding someone today that would be interested in them would be a needle / haystack thing.
It all reminds me of family pictures. Before my grandma died, she went through a large box of B/W photos, explaining to us who all the people were, and we wrote on the back of the photos. But just 3 generations after her, the generation after me, no one knows the people in the photos (except my mom is in some - their grandma). In a way it seems that this family history is somehow important, but no one younger than me is interested at all. And truthfully, I never look at the pictures myself. I ended up scanning the photos with my mom or grandma, putting them on a digital picture frame for my nephews, and leaving the rest out. I asked them first - they didn't care about any of the others.
I'm not an archivist, but it seems to me that curation is a much more important aspect than grabbing everything and keeping it alive forever. Not curating seems like a "scale to infinity" problem. Those tend to not end well.
I think the IA is great project and am not intending to be critical, but giving my own perspective about preserving some very small piece of computer history.