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Comment by jleyank | Hacker News Reader

It's quite sad that the computer field almost aggressively forgets or ignores its past. Find an early, say, crossbow and historians go nuts preserving and studying it. People recreate and surmise about Galileo's experiments to help others understand how he learned his physics, ...

But the computer field just shrugs and keeps doing whatever they were doing. Given what the hackers of the 60's and 70's did on crap machines with no resources, you'd think people would want to review what they can teach modern developers.

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It's not just computers. The movie industry has been the same, and that is an artistic field - there's little obsolescence: Afiak there's no system to preserve films.

Even essential films are lost; some burn up in fires; only some private groups have tried to save and restore the most important ones. For example, I read about one legendary American silent film thought lost forever and then was found somewhere in Spain, in a library IIRC (they had to translate the Spanish titles back to English).

It happens in music and other fields. Perhaps the artists and businesses are focused on the present, not seeing their work as historic, and move on to the next thing. What happens to old projects you work on - do you preserve them carefully or are they just kind of left in whatever state they were at the end?

FWIW, I've got backups of stuff from the 80's and early 90's. Would have to be transliterated into new languages or versions of languages but the stuff's been copied from medium to medium so as to remain readable. But it's not my stuff that's important - would have been amazing seeing what the MIT hackers did (as they created hacking) or the Bell Lab people, etc. There's bazillion lines (and who knows how many star trek or 4x4x4 tictactoe games) in BASIC out there :-).

Hell, perhaps it's good it's "forgotten" as it's what's powering the latest versions of Windows and other proprietary O/S.

You can emulate ITS for the PDP10 today under simh-classic which is 'culture' from the MIT frozen in time, from TECO Emacs to Dungeon/Zork and early networking.

https://github.com/PDP-10/its

On Basic, there's the games example -Basic Computer Games- made into a repo at GitHub, and some people are recreating those in modern languages as it's a trivial task (I'm doing ports myself to JimTCL).

https://github.com/GReaperEx/bcg

You can actually use any language, even sh, but for these cases JimTCL it's ridiculously easy to use.

I listened to an interview with the woman who was at the time I believe overseeing the efforts of the Audio Engineering Society to address the problem of the countless recordings made on proprietary digital audio tape machines like the Sony PCM-3348. The total number of those machines that were ever built was small since so few studios could afford them, but they were major studios and thus the masters of many of the most culturally significant albums are on tapes in that format.

She mentioned that even if you could find one of the machines that was working, keeping it running required routine maintenance and that they were down to essentially one guy who was nearing the age of retirement who had the skill and parts to keep one running. So they were in a race against time to figure out which masters to convert.

The problem gets even more thorny for sessions that were recorded using software like ProTools, which has been around in some form or another for almost 40 years, has gone through countless revisions of project file formats, and has a complicated relationship with specialty audio hardware and software plugins.

It seems like there's a general awareness of the problem now and good studios are taking some measures to archive sessions in ways that allow them to be imported in the future, but in the meantime there are two decade's worth of recordings at risk, even if their media hasn't been lost or corrupted. I guess if nothing else its a cool opportunity for people who like to hack on systems of this type though.

All of the recording I did for my friends back in college is stuck in Nuendo/Cubase projects with a bunch of long-obsolete plugins used for mixing and mastering. Going forward I'm going to print every individual track to PCM so that I have a "digital tape" of the entire session to avoid this problem.

The movie industry is also hurt due to copyright too. For some shows, all licenses copies were lost, but copies still exist (like, VHS recordings).

If it were legal and simple to keep copies of movies at home, a lot less would have ever been at risk of being lost.

Simh (now simh-classic) exists since the 90's. And every teen in the early 00's emulated 'expensive' systems from its era such as the PSX, the N64, SNES, NES (not everyone bought the Chinese clone), the Game Boy, MAME... and tons of them due to the love of retroemulation, either became a reverse engineer, programmer or at least got some sysadmin career because setting up some emulated systems requiered heavy knowledge, at least up to the levels of a vocational degree. If you understood tun/tap, networking under simh and you were able to set up NetBSD under it, you would earn a trade degree with ease.

I disagree.

There is a massive interest in older computing, both from a programming and from an art perspective. The demo scene thrives on it.

I have seen many times (and recently) a lot of interest here on HN about ancient 90s arcade machines with "unbeatable" encryption, etc.

There is a massive interest in doing reverse engineering old games to a bit-perfect level.

Kind of -- but bear in mind that the software this article is about (I wrote the article, BTW) is older than the first microcomputer. (I'm using the MITS Altair as my example here.)

Retrocomputing is huge, but it rarely goes much older than CP/M.

I think it is the same for any domain. Only a tiny amount of things from the past are preserved. The egyptian or mesoamerican pyramids would have probably been all demolished if it wasn't a costly task and/or space would have been a limited. We only conserved a small fraction of arts from previous centuries, most of the tools/weapons/machinery that remains from past centuries was mostly kept out of sheer luck because some people are hoarders and their descendency were lazy and recycling wasn't a thing, etc.

I disagree. People spend a tremendous amount of effort archiving computing history.

Find a crossbow from the 70's and i promise few will care. Historians rarely get excited about anything "lost" within living memory. Many a historian has spent a summer digging through an ancient roman trash pile. But you wont see any digging up landfills from the 80s.

I think the field is still too young. Archeologists are looking at things hundreds or thousands of years old. Galileo died in the late 1600s. I think in a couple hundred years people will give Unix (and other inventions of the time) the attention and respect it deserves.

That's certainly one opinion, and is even right, to some degree. But there's also movies like the Imitation Game about Alan Turing, which is a movie, and not a documentary, but there are also countless documentaries about him. There's no shortage of hagiographies about Steven Jobs, in both book and film and tv miniseries format, along with Pirates of Silicon Valley which includes Microsoft's part. There's a movie about Aaron Swartz (The Internet’s Own Boy). The movie Antitrust(2001) is fictional, but in the same area.

Hackers (1995) is fictional but a cult classic. Freedom Downtime (2001) is about Mitnick and hacking culture. There's smaller documentaries too. There's that one about Wikileaks, that one about Cambridge Analytica. There's books like The Dream Machine (Mitchell), Unix: A History and a Memoir (Brian W. Kernighan), The UNIX‑HATERS Handbook (Simson Garfinkel et al.). There's http://folklore.org about the early days at Apple. Asiometry has https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ffh3DRFzRL0, a 20 minute bit about the Unix wars.

The source code to the original Microsoft DOS is at https://github.com/microsoft/MS-DOS. The Anarchist Cookbook is on Kindle, https://www.2600.com/Magazine/digital-back-issues goes back to 2010.

DefCON got too big for the Riv and the Sahara, and is now at the LVCC. Yeah it's not the same. It's never going to be the same, but some still gather for their yearly mecca and watch Hackers and get drunk in hotel suites paid for by corporate sponsors. Others stay home for various reasons.

Do we still keep what we're doing? I mean, I don't program in Z80 ASM assembly anymore. There are still classes in my code by the focus on OOP isn't what it once was. I'm not sure if I want to call it progress, but I don't program Win32 applications anymore. I can spin up a web app with an LLM in an afternoon, and have it web-scale to the whole world in less time than it used to take to get a computer racked in a colo.

It's not 1979, the cable I use to go from USB-C to HDMI is more powerful than the computer that took us to space. By like, a million times.

Look, I'm not saying we shouldn't respect our elders. By this point, though my beard's not yet grey, relatively speaking I am an elder. I learned to program from paper books. Before ChatGPT, before Stack Overflow, before Google. There are some here that predate me by decades. If you're competing with a $10 million Oracle db system, and going from 6 ASM instructions to 5 in the inner loop will eke out that extra percent of performance, and win you the contract, by all means, sit down, roll up your sleeves, and hand optimize assembly in order to figure out how to get rid of that one instruction.

The joke is oft made, that other fields stand on the shoulder of giants, while in computer science, we stand on their toes. And it's not wrong. I can't wait to for the next new language to pop up and reimplement a DAG solver for their package management woes, and to invent a better sandbox for running untrusted code. That's still an unsolved problem. If this stuff interests you, the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California is worth the visit. The only problem is that at the end of the tour is computers I grew up with, which has a certain way of making a fella feel old.

The travesty that is happening right now, is in the wake of Paul Allen's death, is the debache with his surviving sister and the Seattle Living Computer Museum.

/usr/share/games/fortunes and /usr/games have tons of history on any BSD.

There's TUHS, too.

On AI and such... errors accumulate over time, exponentially. Beware.

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