Recovery of heritage software stored on magnetic tape for Commodore microcomputers

Digital games make up a significant but little known chapter in the history of the moving image in Australia and New Zealand.  Beginning in the early 1980s, the Australasian software industry developed a remarkable record of content creation. The ``Play It Again'' project is conducting research into the largely unknown histories of 1980s game development in Australia and New Zealand, ensuring that local titles make it into national collections and are documented and preserved, enabling the public to once again play these games. Microcomputers from the 1980s made extensive use of compact audio cassettes to distribute software as an inexpensive alternative to the floppy disk technology available at the time. Media from this era are at risk of degradation and are rapidly approaching the end of their lifespan. As hardware platforms and peripheral devices become obsolete, access to the data for future scholars and other interested parties becomes more difficult. In this article, we present a case study, wherein we investigate the issues involved in making digital copies with a view to the long term preservation of these software artefacts. A video game title stored on standard compact cassette for Commodore's popular VIC-20 machine, ``Dinky Kong'' by Mark Sibley was recorded using both inexpensive amateur and professional playback equipment. The audio files obtained were processed using freely available software, alongside a customised decoder written in MATLAB and Perl. The resulting image files were found to be playable using an emulator. More importantly, the integrity of the data itself was verified, by making use of error detection features inbuilt to the Commodore tape format, which is described in detail. Issues influencing the quality of the recovered image files such as the bit rate of the digital recording are discussed. The phenomenon of audio dropout on magnetic tape is shown be of some concern, however there exist signal processing techniques to compensate for such errors. The end result of the imaging process was a file compatible with a popular Commodore VIC-20 emulator, the integrity of which was verified by using inbuilt checksums

Living Legacies: Recovering Data from 5¼” Floppy Disk Storage Media for the Commodore 64

In an attempt to investigate the challenges of recovering and preserving digital objects from legacy systems this case study focuses on working with a particular storage medium and computing hardware. This study illustrates the physical and representational challenges that result from recovering data created with a Commodore 64 computer and stored on 5¼" floppy disks. A system for classifying types of digital objects found in the sample of recovered data was developed. This study contributes to the discourse of collecting institutions engaged in digital preservation and provides examples of ad hoc solutions for working through the challenges of recovering meaningful information from legacy systems. The issues that come to light in this study can be extended beyond the context of the Commodore 64 to include other types of digital resources and computing artifacts that will potentially cross the archival threshold in the near future

Silicon's Second World: Scarcity, Political Indifference and Innovation in Czechoslovak Computing, 1964-1994

How societies invent, adopt, adapt, distribute and innovate with computers is an important puzzle for historians of technology, economists, educators and government planners alike. This dissertation examines the developmental path of Czechoslovakia from when its premier computer scientist, Antonín Svoboda, emigrated in 1964 to slightly beyond state dissolution in 1993. An industrialized consumer society with little to consume, as Jaroslav Švelch noted, Czechoslovakia illustrates both the still-understudied history of computing in state socialist societies and the global story of innovation and adaptation in liminal spaces that provide human capital and emerging markets for the West. An alternate modernity emerged in what Martin Müller calls the 'Global East,' constituted by users living in scarcity, skeptical of state and capital power and maintaining the countercultural community values articulated by exponents like Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson and Buckminster Fuller. This work contributes to the ongoing turn in the history of technology away from Silicon Valley-centered narratives of invention toward the maintenance, adaptation and second-order innovation better representative of technological encounters globally. Czech and Slovak computer users are the focus: Their social origins, personal politics, creativity and negotiated autonomy framed the shape of computing in their country. Their stories are told often by themselves-in extensive oral interviews with key scientists, prominent dissidents and black marketeers-and in the pages of their community's magazines, journals and newsletters, in television interviews, in their jokes and ribald songs. Their voices are part of a global chorus of hobbyism, tinkering, maintenance and technological communities informed by scholars like Jaroslav Švelch, Melanie Swalwell, Honghong Tinn, Helena Durnová, Patryk Wasiak, Ksenia Tatarchenko and Nathan Ensmenger

An investigation of museum data storage and access technologies including case studies on archaeological records at the National Maritime Museum and visitor Information at the Science Museum

This dissertation investigates the technology for storage and access to data in museums, focusing on requirements for collections management and the information needs of visitors. The various components of museum information systems, including data structures and terminology, recording media, computer software and hardware, manual systems, and management procedures are comprehensively examined through case studies at the National Maritime and Science Museums. The first case study describes and assesses manual and computer based techniques developed for the storage and retrieval of records in the Archaeological Research Centre at the UK National Maritime Museum. The types of data which the system encompasses were derived from a wide range of sources, including both land based and underwater fieldwork; archaeological, historical and ethnographic research; routine curatorial activities, including conservation; and research into the conservation of waterlogged materials. Further aspects considered included the collection of data in the field, and the development of a framework on which the analysis of boat finds could be based. Archaeological and museum record keeping, and contemporary developments in computer technology are reviewed. The design, development and use of the system are described, and the system is assessed against the initial specification and in the light of users' experience. The second case study builds on the experience of the first, and examines the requirements for a visitor information system at the Science Museum in London.Sources which are used include an analysis of overall visitor needs, specific requirements for object based information and public interest in information as exhibited through the use of the Museum's World Wide Web pages. Building on these studies and the experience of other museums providing such a facility, a model system is outlined, including visitor orientation and information points within the Museum and external access to information.The data requirements of this system are tested against the types of information which are already available in the museum. An overall approach to designing the system is described. In conclusion a comparison is made between the information requirements for collection management and visitor information. Technological issues including data structures and database design are reviewed, and the costs of various options are considered

Preserving Virtual Worlds Final Report

The Preserving Virtual Worlds project is a collaborative research venture of the Rochester Institute of Technology, Stanford University, the University of Maryland, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Linden Lab, conducted as part of Preserving Creative America, an initiative of the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program at the Library of Congress. The primary goals of our project have been to investigate issues surrounding the preservation of video games and interactive fiction through a series of case studies of games and literature from various periods in computing history, and to develop basic standards for metadata and content representation of these digital artifacts for long-term archival storage

The application of remote sensing to resource management and environmental quality programs in Kansas

The activities of the Kansas Applied Remote Sensing (KARS) Program during the period April 1, 1982 through Marsh 31, 1983 are described. The most important work revolved around the Kansas Interagency Task Force on Applied Remote Sensing and its efforts to establish an operational service oriented remote sensing program in Kansas state government. Concomitant with this work was the upgrading of KARS capabilities to process data for state agencies through the vehicle of a low cost digital data processing system. The KARS Program continued to take an active role in irrigation mapping. KARS is now integrating data acquired through analysis of LANDSAT into geographic information systems designed for evaluating groundwater resources. KARS also continues to work at the national level on the national inventory of state natural resources information systems

Informational Technology and Its Impact on American Education

A report by the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) that "examines both the demands that the information revolution will make on education and the opportunities afforded by the new information technologies to meet those demands" (p. iii)

Online development in the Nordic countries : a history of online information from the 1960s to the '00s and NORDINFO's role in its development

Some of the contributions to this book have previously been published as unedited manuscripts in 2007 at http://hdl.handle.net/1975/149

A History of Materials and Technologies Development

The purpose of the book is to provide the students with the text that presents an introductory knowledge about the development of materials and technologies and includes the most commonly available information on human development. The idea of the publication has been generated referring to the materials taken from the organic and non-organic evolution of nature. The suggested texts might be found a purposeful tool for the University students proceeding with studying engineering due to the fact that all subjects in this particular field more or less have to cover the history and development of the studied object. It is expected that studying different materials and technologies will help the students with a better understanding of driving forces, positive and negative consequences of technological development, etc