 Welch chi. Stephen Goodwin. Rwy'n dod i weithio. Efo'r gweithio. Rwy'n cael ei ffeydd i gydag i'w slygu, stef. Yn y gweithio ei wneud o'r gweithio, rwy'n ei ddweud ar ôl. Rwy'n cael ei ddweud o gorfod digild archoi. Rwy'n cael ei ddweud o gweithio o'r gweithio. Rwy'n cael ei ddweud o'r gweithio o'r gweithio. Rwy'n cael eu ddweud o'r gweithio. Mae'r Unedig, ddweud y Gweithio. So ddiddol archiolegi yn ymdill o'r cyfnodd yw'r cyfnodd. Ac mae'n ffocwsio ar y ffordd o'r nef yn y ddiddorol 50 min. Mae'n cyfnodd o'r problemau, ysgolwyddiadau a'r ffordd o'r cyfnodd o'r cyfnodd o'r cyfnodd o'r cyfnodd o'r cyfnodd o'r cyfnodd o'r cyfnodd o'r cyfnodd o'r cyfnodd o'r cyfnodd o'r cyfnodd o'r cyfnodd. So chi wedi bod yn ymdill yn ymdill i'w gwaith? Nowa fe oed. Ac mae bonr neu mae dyswch yn gybligoch. Ebamos a rhoi, mae'r hunain yn fawr byw gyde formalol ystod o uchaf i'r ciriath, yw ymddangos wedyn ynAAm ywмы bob adr bentoswr, mae Cymru adeg yma ein fit yna. Mae'r hwnnew iwsiaeth y ddogŸau Efallai, yn cael enwi'n cael ei gwaith o ddaid, ond i'n gynllen i gyfwyrd datblygu. Roedd ydy'r cyflwyniad bod hyn yn fyrraau'r cyflwyniadol? Dysgu'r cyflwyniadol, mae'r cyflwyniadol yn ei gwybod gyddo â'r cyflwyniadol. Mae gennym chwaraeg, ddaid i ddim o'r cyflwyniad, yn ddal iawn i ddysg, ddaid i ddim o'r cyflwyniad, ddigwetio i ddysg, ddigwetio i ddysg wedi debyg i ddysg iawn, Back-ups are only valid if they're tested. Who here tests their back-ups? Not as many hands as they should be, but if you need to say that to those people with their hands up, they're conscious ones. Hire them. Issues with copyright. We're not going to do copyright. Preservation. The first thing to preserve is the physical thing, the actual disc drive, the case and the inlay and anything that goes along with it. this but no one knows where it is no copies left so once we've got our tape how do we go about preserving that piece of software well this is the tape it'll probably jam so you have to use you know take it out the case and put it into another case it isn't just a case of slapping it in, cassettes were recorded using generally two tones they're two different beats a lot of people can probably remember the sound of their computer tape they've probably played it through audio and he goes bydd y'r code yn yw wedi cael ei wneud fy yn 5% ond mae o'r têb yn gweithio'r rhan o'r têb, ond mae'n olygu'r yma, i ddaeth rwy'n gwneud y b Communion ac mae'n gweithio'r têb. Felly mae'n gweithio'r têb o'r ddatblygu o'r ddaeth a'r cyfnodd yma i'r ddau os rwynt yn gweithio'n gweithio'r ddau. Rwy'n gofod â'r ffordd o'r llwr i gynghori, mae'r pen a ddaeth, gweithio, gweithio, gweithio. If that doesn't fix it, you can modify the load and save routines. This is the bit which I mentioned saying, the computers have a plus or minus 5% tolerance, but if you're loading it into an emulator, say, or another piece of software, you can rewrite those load and save routines to accept a 10% tolerance, or a 20% tolerance, or modify them entirely just to get the program to load. Sometimes it's unfortunately necessary, it's dull and it's tedious work. The next problem on preservation is, well, how's it stored? We don't always use this 2047 1033 method. For things like copy protection, which you may be aware of, people decided they'd write their own load and save routines so that the normal load and save routines wouldn't work. So your standard discopying programs and your standard tape copying programs would not work. So you have to work around them. Some people work fast loaders, custom loaders, and there was even a product which would let you load games off of a CD. You take the audio out of the CD drive, you stick it into your computer and you would load it off the CD. Because the CD doesn't have this wound flutter and it doesn't vary the pitch at all, you can record a much higher frequency, which means you can get a lot more data quicker. But trying to find machines of that era are quite difficult, so you have to keep the hardware as well. And if you do find a program that's using these fast loaders, you have to make a note of what it's using. Just as a, by the way, I'm talking mostly about cassettes here, but this applies to any kind of medium. So what computer is this tape for? It might say Spectrum, for example. Who had a Spectrum? Oh, not bad. Good. So you'd write on it, this tape, which I've just now uncovered, runs on a Spectrum. Which Spectrum? How many Spectrums were there? Well, if you type in ZX Spectrum issue into Google, you don't need to be a computer historian to know there's more than one search result, and you don't need to be a hardware person to notice there's more than one circuit board. There are at least 13 SKUs in eight distinct versions. I have seen numbers go as high as 25, so that they include things like the Spectrum Plus, the Plus, the 128, the Plus 2, the black version of the Plus 2, and despite the cut, it looks like it's only changing the case colour. There isn't. They actually changed the whole circuit board. One of them works, the other one doesn't. We're on Sinclair, and the 128 Plus 3. And these are just the main versions that most people have. The next part of the problem comes in processing that software, which basically means how are we actually going to load it in if we can't run it? Copy protection is a pain. Does anyone have this game? It's a trilogy of adventure games. Wow, there it is. You fit it? Oh, no-one ever did. No-one finished this one. But they had a really simple copy protection system. They made the manual so enormous that you needed the manual. You had to type in a word from page 26, row 3 on the manual, to be able to get into the game. Photocopying an entire book was quite expensive. So naturally, not many people pirated it. But if you don't have that book, you can't play the game. Anyone have elite for the Spectrum? Did you have the lens lock? Did the lens lock work? Yeah. This device here, this is called lens lock, and it is a diffraction grating, which is a postulating from a piece of plastic that Wobble's image is about. And you put it onto your screen. And a piece of this screen image from over here appears on this side of your vision and vice versa. So the screen displays a wobbly weird graphic. You put this thing on the screen and it shows you another weird wobbly graphic because your TV is the wrong size. People got paid money to develop that. So it didn't work on the TVs at the time. It certainly doesn't work on them now and it doesn't generally work on LCDs either. Nice one, guys. Monkey Island, a much more recent game. Yes, yes, pretty much everyone's good. You had this little dialer pirate wheel and you know, the screen would say now turn the pirate wheel to this and that. And you could play the game. If you've lost this, you can no longer play the game. Which by the way, this face here, pointed out, I did this talk in Cambridge a while back and someone pointed out, that looks like Donald Trump. I thought, yeah, but there is one difference. Donald Trump and a pirate. No, people aspire to be a pirate. Ooh, okay. And yes it willy. This was the copy. But if you didn't like the idea of photocopying in time manual, you certainly wouldn't be able to colour photocopy this thing. You could do. It would be expensive and some people would spend their maths lessons writing out this chart by writing R, B, B, B, Y, Y, Y, B and so on. I'm not saying I did that. I'm just saying some people in maths lessons would copy this chart. Luckily nowadays, this thing is available online so you can actually find, get into Jet Set Willy with this copy protection system. But for a long time, you couldn't. These pieces of card were not given away that you couldn't buy them. If you wrote a software project and said, I'm sorry I've lost my card and you send me another one, they would say no. So for a long time, Jet Set Willy was lost even though it's one of the most popular games just because the pieces of cardboard weren't available. Some other software would have dongles and other things to protect it, especially the more expensive things which again will get lost. So the solution is emulation. Well, one of the solutions is emulation. My favourite solution that is. Open source projects are bound here. Mame supports computers as well as games consoles. Big project, virtual box, because we can't escape windows no matter how much we might try. It's also important because we can't escape older versions of operating systems as well and this is an easy way to do it. Something even open source software from years ago. There was a lot of emulators written which are now defunct because they only worked on this version of DOS or that version of Windows. And it's an unfortunate state of affairs but emulators are one of the few pieces of software which actually can get finished. Every piece of software you work on is either out of date and needs updating because it needs fixing or whatever or it's redundant because we don't use that anymore we use something new. The ZX Spectrum for the 1982 release is the same spectrum it is now. So you can actually write an emulator and say the emulator is finished. Which is fine but it means it suffers bog standard bit rot. Someone releases it onto their website they say there you go the emulator is done it's finished I don't need to touch it. And 20 years later you suddenly realise that you can't run it anymore because that version of Windows is not available you have to then run it under an emulator. So you're running an emulator on an emulator. If you want to do this whole down rabbit whole thing again a thing in Cambridge there was a ZX81 emulator running on a dragon emulator which was running on a meager which was running on a virtualised Mac. Which was a pointless exercise if ever there was one. But the fact that you can still keep that old machine alive by its successive emulation is a sign that maybe we can retain some of that past. Zeta FM, the VM, so this is what I heard about last year I've not properly looked at it. It's a virtual machine for dynamic languages which might be thinking well why can't the dynamic language actually be the language of the chip on the machine? There's a possibility there. Emulates is one of my little things it's just a I have it basically to talk about emulation and one of the things on there is describing the chip as an XML file describing it as a process so then you run the XML through a process and it spits out the emulator code. At the moment it's an idea maybe it will work and the tip at the bottom which you've all read might now look for machine-specific things. J.S. Speckie as the name might suggest is a JavaScript emulator for the spectrum. The guy that wrote that knows a stupid amount on the spectrum much more than the guys that might name. So if anyone can make it work on JavaScript it's Matt and because he knows that stuff that emulator is better than the others so always go for a specialist thing if you can. So thinking badly about copy protection there was one system that had perfect copy protection. It's that. The games were so bad no one could be bothered to copy it. And in fact on some of these you can see it was written for the BBC Dragon Spectrum Apple Atari Oric one ZX81 and VIC-20. On a couple of those machines notably the dragon they didn't even bother testing the final tape because no one had noticed the last two games on there will record it onto the lead-out tape and therefore you couldn't actually play them. I have no idea where they've gone and that's it, we're done. We can now preserve all of our old tapes all of our old discs and keep them for the next generation. Because I quite like the idea that in the future I will be able to share what I grew up with with the next generation. I think that would be quite nice. But, you know, we can't do it. We've got to document everything. Document the program, the machine it's for which version of that machine. How to bypass I mean how to legitimately use the copy protection and store it somewhere. One of the bigger problems because it's a community and communities have ego problems a number of retro sites over the last few years have been having a lot of problems and a lot of infighting. There are archives which had all the software on. Everyone would take their tape they would sample it in they would fix it up they would send it to the archive the archive would keep it. Fantastic. Then the owner of the archive gets a little bit knocked at someone else that's running the archive and they shut the site down and take all the software and it's all disappeared. Archive.org does not help with this unfortunately because it preserves the pages not the zip files with the programs in. So if it can be held somewhere like GitHub as an example which is a little more public it's still as a service provider but making it available so people can take it and fork it and preserve it themselves is a good thing. That one which is the thing I'm messing around with at the moment this is just basically an archive of metadata and it's only in the request for comment stage right now it's a case of saying if you want to preserve information about the machine it's social impact your relationship to it is this format a good way of doing it? So if you get bored just have a look and send me comments. So to recap on the solutions and this is the TLDR version of the talk examine the audio structure look at it break it apart work out how you need to load it back in and document what it is. Document the loading method so some computers again I mentioned the Dragon32 there was a different command for loading basic to loading machine code if you were working on the Dragon at that time you'd naturally instinctively know whether it's basic or machine code coming back to it after 30 years you probably don't so you need to make a note of how do you load this? The Jupyter Ace used fourth this would sometimes require you to load a bit of a program in define a dictionary method and then use that to load the next bit of the program in it's not obvious by looking at it how you need to load that so that needs to be all documented next learn the copy protection system emulators are always good for this that screen is I think Manic Miner could be Jet Set archive those recordings not in MP3 because it's lossy you want proper loss of stuff because the disk space is cheap and this starts actually I'll go on to the next one so just archive properly and document it all make sure everything's known Lego I managed to get in every talk I do I managed to get something in Lego and always have a beer so I've got my two touchstones down now so document what the software is what version it is how it needs to be loaded store in something such as Git so it can be available that's a trying to avoid in fighting and communities and store everything again grab websites occasionally I mirror far too much for my own good if you can get original documents obviously and latest is not always greatest this one I put in because I was doing I was doing some archive work on a machine and I managed to load the tape into the machine it sampled well I managed to process it and store it as a snapshot I needed to go back and do some other things so I'd got the latest version of that software and it no longer worked apparently people add bugs into software who knew so keep a track of everything so when you say I'm loading this game into this machine you're saying well I'm loading this game using this version of the software into this version of the emulator because the newer versions might not work everything needs to be refreshed the same way you need to refresh the backups as you move from tape to disk to cloud you need to refresh everything itself and this includes the emulators there are currently as far as I can tell three emulators for a computer called the Elliott now the Elliott was a machine in the 1960s there were about a thousand were made I think there were ten working left on the planet we have one in Cambridge I'm not allowed to play with it because it's quite brittle but there are three emulators so I can use the emulators one is written in Ada which I don't know and all the Ada programmers are in the Ada room which is always full so I can't ask them how that emulator works the other one is written in F sharp who here has used F sharp there are actually hands for that I thought there was going to be no one okay so you can help with the emulator I've looked at F sharp and it's like okay I get it nowadays is a little bit tricky it's not really supported it's a Microsoft platform it seems to have been mostly dead so again you need an emulator to bring up an old version of windows with an old version of a dev environment to actually run through F sharp because a lot of the complications in an emulator is not the instruction set it's the minutia those little bits those little timing things the odd bits the bugs in the hardware that the emulator has to reproduce if the code is in a language you don't understand or it's tricky or it's obsolete you don't get that nuance so the new version of emulators are not as good which brings me to emulator number three which is in javascript which I wrote on the euro star over here and it's very bare bones but at least it's javascript so at least I can understand it oh and document everything exploring the tools there are often tools that come along with the emulators so going back to the tape which uses the two frequencies beep beep there are often tools that will take in a tape where the frequencies vary outside that plus or minus 5% they'll sample it in they'll fix that plus or minus 5% and then they'll write out a new tape which is perfect write it out as a file which you can then record there are a lot of tools like that which help again the version of it will vary sometimes the version will break so having every version necessary documenting which version is used to fix up which tape and how to run the tools as well tools are there as tools they are there to do a job and often that job is restore one piece of software once and that's fine but it does mean that the second person needs to come along has no documentation and they don't know how to run that tool and documenting the source chain so by that it's very good that we've got a tape here which says this is Jet Set Willy for the 48k spectrum it's very good that it says this is how you must load it it's very good there's documentation that says here this is the copy protection system but if you don't have another document that says how all these things are joined up you won't be able to put the bits together so the whole source chain needs to be documented and noted and that's kind of one of the things I'm hoping that the archive will do preserving people's knowledge future so that's it we can store all this and the future is going to be absolutely perfect now we know what to do to preserve old software all the current stuff will be preserved going forward excellent all you need to do on this computer is plug a USB in which one? this isn't even a full set this is what I had beside my desk when I thought about taking this picture I know there's a lot more but these are the ones that I have and I don't have a lot of kit so even going forward we need to make a lot more notes about what we're actually doing so the future is going to be imperfect maybe we can't rebuild the emulators quick enough maybe we can't build the software quick enough maybe we can't write enough documentation if you're having a little chat with someone about building something and you're doing it in Slack for example that's transient come next week you might not be able to scroll back far enough Slack might go under, get bought or something and all that information is going to get lost writers from the 1800s, 1900s and even 20th century wrote on things called paper using things called pens and pencils when they die people are actually able to go into their loft to find the boxes of all these papers read the diaries and learn how that author got to where they got to look at their notes for characters see how their plotting developed we can't do that in 100 years time no one's going to go back and say let's look at the Slack channel let's see how they came up with this idea for software let's see what they did we won't be able to, it will be an email it will be locked out by passwords so we've got to bear that in mind and we don't own our data anymore as much as we like to think we do so another problem we're going to have and I'm guilty of this as well things that are done on the web we're going to be losing most of that as well if you ever remember sites that says this website works best in Navigator this page has been designed for IE6 all those sort of things sometimes it's merciful that they're gone but for a historical point of view understanding the social impact that each of these things had it will be lost any old web games, flash games flash, yeah great that it's dying great HTML5 standard great that it's taking off not so great but there were a load of flash games that people of a generation younger than I grew up on I wrote some of them online games I wrote some of them too but they are also going to die I mean Blizzard, now World of Warcraft even Blizzard cannot re-run the very first version of World of Warcraft because the servers have changed so much the clients have changed so much that it's not possible to play that original version so if you want to see what got people hooked on World of Warcraft by playing that first version you can't it's a cultural gaming phenomenon which you can't play but some people tried rebuilding some of the Blizzard servers in Bnet D and Blizzard go we don't like that and they took them to court and shut them down so the one hope we had of keeping some stuff alive you can't and for a previous company I worked for a company called Playfish which built, unfortunately games on Facebook so there were flash games on the web online as a service gaming as a service you would buy little things in the game a few companies I mean we had 10 million people a day every day playing some of my games that was fantastic except now they're all gone because it's Facebook's service that's gone the company's gone the flash back end servers which was written in Java they're all gone even if you happen to have saved some of the flash files that were downloaded you only downloaded the files you needed so you probably wouldn't be able to play it again even if you rebuilt the server so I as anyone am guilty of building stuff that is has built in obsolescence which is a shame that's gone the games that people enjoyed playing 10 million people a day will at some point look back and say I remember playing pet society that was great fun wish I could show the kids but I can't so conclusiony type multiple stages of preserving the stuff first is the physical medium and this is the TLDR version of the TLDR bit I just did so we start with the physical medium preserving that stuff sometimes taking the tapes out putting them into new casings finding a way of archiving that in a good stable format WAV files, lossless files preserving the data itself saying what is it that I'm preserving here how it needs to be processed by the machine how it's loaded in do you load it as basic load it as machine code do you process it in some ways a copy protection on it going in a way that someone cannot take offline which pretty much comes to the end an opportunity for questions some links there oh I should update my scorecard there we go so yeah I can I think I've got time for questions no one's put up signs yes I've got time for questions I've got lots of time for questions wow 20 minutes do we have 20 minutes worth of questions because I do stuff at the computer museum in Cambridge as I said and although I do preserve some bits of hardware and some bits of software there a lot of my time is spent talking to human beings about the computers and why they're important so I can talk quite literally for hours so we've got a question here okay I have about five boxes of three and a half inch floppy disks for my old Atari ST but my STs don't work anymore and I don't have any other floppy drives so could you recommend what the best way of transferring them to something stable is right so question is about getting floppy disks actually into an archivable format when you don't actually have a working floppy disk drive and in the case of floppy disks it's one of those cases where you just need to find another floppy disk a lot of people because people are now of the age where what we had as a kid we are able to rebuild ourselves as grown-ups I use the word grown-up in the loosest sense my teddy bear says I'm grown-up so that's good enough but what people are doing is they're taking the disk drive interface feeding it to hardware like Arduino's and Raspberry Pi's and then getting that to be a disk controller it's a virtualised disk controller and that then goes into a Raspberry Pi or an Arduino which can then go into a solid state memory and there are a lot of devices out there especially for the more popular machines Spectrum Cobble there's probably one for the Atari where you plug that in and it goes oh right I know this but the hardware is tricking it and it's actually loading stuff off of SSD one of the things we have at the museum is a spectrum with this SD card in it so you can play a thousand games off of an old spectrum without wearing outtakes without wearing out the disk drives so you may be able to get one of those units to rip the stuff off I mean there was a lot of software at the time things like CrossDOS for the Amiga which would allow the Amiga's disk drive to read a PC disk format and that is one way you can do it you'll often find those sort of pieces of software that's the question over here yes I find it peculiar that you don't mention more ephemeral means of archiving the context for example taking a video of the working system it's not a real backup but it can be preserved much more easily and it shows something that the other things that you mentioned really don't capture the feeling of it yes recording videos of the old machines in situ is a fantastic resource and yes we can stick things on YouTube and use that it's a lot more work but that's fine I like the videos, they're great the only thing they don't give me is the opportunity to play with it computers are an interactive thing games which is a lot of my background I like being able to say what happens if you do that what if I did this instead of what that person on the video did so I like videos but if it's possible to have it working for reals that's even better another question on this side I know it's a question on that side do you test your documentation for example by giving it to someone who doesn't know anything about the technology would I leave documentation to someone who doesn't know about technology how do you test your documentation documentation for me when it's good it's great when it's bad it's better than nothing so even if they don't know a lot about the tech at least having something means that someone that is better at writing could take it and massage it into something that's readable proposed or they could massage that into something that's more technical because the hardest part and a lot of things documentation everything else is about getting started so if anyone even they're not technical getting something started is a plus point is it questions thank you for your speech one question it's more a comment it's not only about game and software but for example in 30 years from now you will not be able to have something called a classic car that is built today because you will not have software to run it I didn't get all that so in the future we're not going to have any software to run any of these things no no for example if you take some a car that is built today and in 30 years from now all the computers that is inside a car you will not be able to build it again so you don't have a working working car anymore and it's also true for every consumer goods that we can have today and that is embedding some software so for this digital heritage it's not only about game and software it's about almost everything today yeah I could do and hold another talk on what we do going forward machines in cars and all this kind of stuff at the moment I don't know how we're going to preserve that stuff I'll leave that to someone smarter possibly I'll come back in 20 years and tell you how we did it then there's a microphone now a few years ago I was working in a library to do the IT there and to my amazement none of my nine colleagues who had master's degrees in librarianship and archiving knew even the least bit about what a database was or how to archive anything that wasn't paper or parchment so I was wondering is this like a hole in the belgian system or do you also notice the same lack of knowledge about with actual library professionals about archiving anything that's produced later than 1955 do you notice that is that a worldwide phenomenon is there something missing here what should we do I think it's similar so the question is about professional librarians not knowing how to archive modern things and it does seem to be true I went to the British Library a couple of years ago not to borrow a book but to talk to them guys about this stuff and they've got a project where they're doing emulation as a service with a university in Germany and it's new to them and it's like this is the British Library this library is basically our modern Alexandria but they're librarians they're not tech people and the same way it was early on this stage where the MEP was saying about politicians and tech people are not really having that dialogue librarians and tech people also are not having that dialogue and it's the same problem I call it the information dissemination problem it's very easy a lot of the time you have a lawnmower to sell I want to buy a lawnmower you both go to eBay, you do the lawnmower simple if I have a piece of knowledge which is useful to you and you need some knowledge from me how do I know who you are how do I know how to get that information to you if you are working in a school for example or a library and it's like right I know how this library needs to store this information how do I get it how do I know that person exists how do I get to that person if I call up or email I'm going to get the receptionist the receptionist goes it's another time waste to try to sell stuff so there isn't an easy answer on how do you get that information to the person that needs it and it's an ongoing problem but hopefully some people will see and put the two and two together actually I know this librarian they should go and talk to Steve and then he'll help them then Steve will put them in touch with someone else so hopefully something will happen but it's still unsolved hi Steve is the time for one more point you said it's very important to keep the original documents if we look at the first talk in this series the original the archetypal ancient unix in pp7 was lost till someone found a printer and retyped the characters back in I used to work in X-ray imaging in a hospital and someone pointed out to me that film X-rays are outdated and expensive but they act both as an acquisition medium they act as a medium for storing the images long term and also for reviewing them and all you need is a light source to look through a film and the same goes for analog photography printed out on photographic paper we say that's very outdated these days we poo poo, we've all got phones we've all got google albums on the web but if you keep analog photographs in a box in 20 years time if it doesn't get damp you can bring it out and all you need is a light to be able to view it you don't need something digital so I don't know what you're talking about because they're kind of bad in being preserved because they will rot in the digital sense you've actually reminded me of two points which I should probably go over here for this is what my university lecturer called a mid lecture activity you go to the other side of the stage and you do sort of a complete break you've reminded me of two bits one of them is that computers and software is a bit like episodes of Doctor Who we all know Doctor Who in its modern form mostly I've said but there are episodes of Doctor Who that despite being one of the most popular sci-fi shows of 50 years that are lost how does something which is that popular have episodes which have been lost and lost forever this is the BBC they recorded them, they broadcast them they thought no one's ever going to want to see this again it's a piece of cultural history and they junked it because of fire regulations the spectrum as you've said has millions of pieces of software for it and some of them are missing why are they missing, they just are there's deep parallel there so trying to recover that yes you could print everything out and then you'd be able to view it using only light but this stuff is going to get lost you had a question I think nope hello hi so we talk a lot about emulators for computers from the 80s and 90s what work is actually being done now and is it even possible to build an emulator for example for the latest Xbox or the Playstation 4 will we still be able to use this tool in the future good question and obviously when someone says good question this is something I wanted to talk about but didn't get around to is it possible to build emulators for example Playstation 4 and the answer is not easily and not now I wrote a series of games for the original Xbox original Playstation and I'm allowed to tell you that but I'm not allowed to tell you how I did it all the documentations for all of those consoles are under NDA we're not even allowed to take the machines out of the office that we hand them in so if you want to build an emulator for that you can now go online because some people have leaked the specs but for most of those machines especially the newer ones which are still under NDA which are still being fiercely protected you can't you can't even read the API that you need to program these things let alone see what silicon is being used and that is going to be a problem you're going to just have to keep the hardware alive because you won't be able to build it in software my guess is maybe 10 years PS4 specs will get leaked the APIs will be available and emulators will start getting ridden the technicality of writing an emulator is not difficult the difficulty is getting that knowledge and getting the knowledge which hasn't been written down by someone those little bits, those bugs which no one noticed the things that only the operators that spent day in day out on them would know here's a machine that doesn't work, kick it here that sort of little bit of knowledge which is being passed down person to person, vocally that stuff's getting lost but hopefully the archive project up there that's just a dumping ground where I'm hoping people will send me things like serial numbers for their machines and their memories of the things so bits don't get lost and hopefully that will be a place station for, give it a while I'm Basit Stankiewicz I have a question do you, my father wrote probably the first commercial compiler in 1959 the year I was born in France I have a report in French about that drum machine at home but my father wrote it so I don't want to put it in the garbage it's emotionally important to me I'm happy to give it anywhere if it is useful but I don't know where I'm happy even to scan it but it's not that easy and so on what kind of concrete advice could you give me and I can also add that as a teenager I worked on 59 machine in a museum in 1974 so I have some remembrance of it what can I do with all of it so what you can do with old machines old documentation is find a computer museum and there's not that many unfortunately but they're especially the one that I've evolved in always happy to take stuff there's two lots of reasons we take stuff one is it's important and it gets archived and it gets documented no proper museums which are properly run everything is everything is file stamped ranked debriefed and numbered so we know everything we have a history of so when someone donates to the museum fine just because something is in French doesn't mean it's any less important to the history of computers that wasn't meant to be a joke but it was serious I am occasionally serious so yes find a museum Cambridge in that is happy I'm sure there's one here somewhere but my French is bad I'm useless at French so you know of a French museum give the mic M-I-M-P there is a museum a computer museum in Belgium in Namur and it's look on the internet it's N-A-M slash IP N-A-M that's where you need to go one more question it's been useful it's more a command because I think most of what you said applies to hardware too and not only to software because for those old computers there were extension cartridges and what not and even reverse engineering the chips in the computer is super important now because it helps improve us to do the emulators or even rebuild the machines with the means of FPGAs or something like this and I think your principles can be applied for hardware as well absolutely everything I've said about software applies to hardware the difference being hardware is a slightly different skill set computers from ten years ago you need to replace the capacitors but also chips a lot of people who are in Facebook groups about repairing the old BBC micros or whatever yes well this chip's not available but this is an equivalent for nowadays or this thing you can't get so you need to use this instead the knowledge is out there it's just about getting everyone to share it as we've already seen one chap asks I want a museum to give this to another chap says well this is the museum to give it to just creating that form I think is at least a start you have a microphone I have a microphone and it's great finally I can make a short notice and ask a short question thank you first of all I would like to mention that taking into account the really small memory footprint and a small consumption of computer power from the contemporary point of view there is some practical sense to treat software, ancient software as not as emulator at all but as some very specific type of multimedia document if you can use your virtualized operating systems from 1980s for example or even more earlier times as a very special multimedia well image or almost image and embedded into some documents then well at least it can be easily implemented in practice taking into account that well at least HTML5 documents with some embedded javascript and so on allows us to do it and it may be a little bit more comfortable approach than running emulators separately and the short question is whether you have some learning courses targeted at well starting these ancient software or anything like this currently are there anything do I have any courses was that yeah some university courses or anything like this do students have some courses related to ancient software I don't know of any courses that are specific about either emulation or archiving of things I don't know if that's an intentional decision because who on earth would want to do this stuff or whether it's just a case of it's actually quite new previously not many people have considered the idea of preserving an old computer and old piece of software why would they use computers you want the new you want the shiny but from my point of view from a cultural thing everyone uses computers now whereas everyone used to read books so computers are our modern day tool so they should be preserved but no one has probably got round to realising there needs to be a course to teach it yet so everything is basically trial and error right now I'm learning this when I was mentioning actually with you earlier about the British Library they're learning stuff from me learning from them they have a thing it's not about preserving this machine for the next five years or meaning I can preserve it long enough to get the data off it they're looking at 50 to 100 to 500 years of preservation and that's an order of magnitude beyond what we're generally trying to think of when we just think I just need the machine to work a little bit longer please don't crash until I've saved this that kind of thing so maybe at some point there'll be courses but I don't know of any just yet well for the hardware you could write like you said an emulator that's finished but how will you ever know you always have problems like a transistor is too close to another transistor and you never see any strange thing so you think I emulated the hardware perfectly but you didn't and then if the emulator code is used a couple of years later for yet another medium this effect will only grow and grow and grow and give it 20 years and it will do something completely different to software on the hardware you will still think that the emulation is perfect but I assume it will never be correct so the question evolves around emulation is never going to be perfect and it's actually kind of right the simplified emulators are perfect enough but there are two words in this community emulation and there's simulation what I call an emulator is technically a simulator it isn't doing what the actual hardware ever did it's just pretending to be that and that's kind of a problem because as you say a couple of transistors will interact you might get things like ground bounce if you get enough current going through the emitters part of your circuit it raises the value of ground well if it raises the value of ground then it will be perfect and as you refresh each cycle as you take the F-sharp emulator and we do it in javascript some of these bits that they thought of first time around will get lost and over time like the whole Chinese whispers thing you start off with one machine and you end up with something isn't quite that machine again and unfortunately I don't have a good solution for that yet other than running emulators on emulators I mean you can simulate things at the hardware level but it's a lot more complex and it's a lot more than people want to do it's generally easier to maintain the physical hardware so we've got time for one more question okay no more there was one here on the end one last question hello so regarding your last comment about maintaining hardware do you think makes sense to maintain kind of like kind of have obligatory to send a copy of it hardware and to be stored somewhere for example by your project and kind of have it somewhere and keep it for like relevant for the next generations let's say keeping hardware relevant like basically the rule which is applied to books and newspaper which is obligatory to send one copy or more copies to the national library and keeping them there and so on and so forth yeah so if newspapers going online but they're not being archived the way that paper was and the British library is certainly trying to do things of that I'm not involved with them doing that I just chat to them occasionally so they do have a remit where they can take copies of the websites for the new stories of the day and the comments to get a feel for how the public reacted at this point because that's the sort of thing future historians will look back on but there isn't a good way of doing that you know you can screen scrape but you know we've probably all written a screen scrape at some point someone changes their website you can't archive that information anymore yeah it would be nice about what if a company supplied its hardware to the British library in the same way that newspapers supply newspapers and books to the British library and I agree I would love that Sony would not like that they would say this is my proprietary information this is copyright this is NDA unfortunately I don't agree with them you know if you want to be able to maintain it if you buy something and you truly want to own that thing not knowing what's inside it not having a schematic I think is a hindrance to that all the old computers and by old I mean good computers they had a schematic in the back there was a circuit diagram that's fantastic I never used the circuit diagram but I liked the fact it was there modern machines don't do that I would like if they did but I don't know if I'm a pessimist or a realist when I say I don't expect Sony or Microsoft or Nintendo to go along with that and certainly not to the detail that would be necessary to build an emulator or to maintain it they'll have here is a chip I'm not telling you what's inside it I'm not telling you how it works I'm not telling you the inputs versus the outputs I'm just saying here is a chip we manufacture it we're not saying any more than that but I was hoping to add on a positive note and I've just said the future is damned but the future is going to be great because we can now preserve it and we'll be able to play Jetset Willie forever which is basically how long it takes to play that game thank you goodnight