Comment by kristofferR | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kristofferR | Hacker News Reader

I really hope the author of this great piece shares his rare copy of MacApp 1.1 with the world, so it won't end up as another piece of lost software history only alive in our memories.

This guy was incredibly lucky in finding a mostly non-corrupted floppy available for sale. In just a few years the few remaining working floppy originals will cease working and MacApp will end up as just another lost piece of software - unless pirate copies are made.

You can say and think what you want about software piracy, but it's undeniable that it has saved a lot of ancient software and games from ceasing to exist in anything other than our memories. Illegal software/ROM archives have probably done more to keep the revolutionary time of the early computing/gaming history alive than all the legal old-fashioned libraries have done combined.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/248571/why_history_needs_soft...

Thankfully there is very little enforcement of the copyright law on ancient software - and so few developers/publishers are bothered enough by the fact that someone is illegally enjoying, archiving and sharing their 10-30 year old software that they bother issuing takedown notices - that it is effectively "legal", or at least tolerated in the same way as cannabis is in the Netherlands. The fact that it won't actually be really legal until 2040-2060 is totally absurd, and a powerful testament to how outdated and irrelevant the current copyright laws are.

"Outdated" is not the right term I would say. Assuming you are referring to US law here, the current, extremely long copyright is the result of relatively recent corporate lobbying efforts.

Copyright was extended further and further at the request of powerful interests. It used to be much shorter.

Originally US copyright lasted only 14 years, with a possible extension of another 14 years if the author was still alive and requested it.

Nowadays US copyright lasts until 70 years after the original author's death.

That is inaccurate, unfortunately. Copyright has lasted way too long for over a century now.

You are correct that the original US copyright law was set to the reasonable maximum of 14+14 years, however that was extended to 28+28 years already in 1909, not exactly a relatively recent development.

In 1976, 35 years ago, it was further extended to 75 years after publication or 50 years after death of author. In 1998 it was extended further to an insane 120 years after creation or life + 70 years.

Even if the copyright length insanity actually only was a relatively recent phenomenon from 1998, I don't see why that would exclude it from the "outdated" term.

I had heard it was largely due to Disney. Not sure if that's true?

Disney lobbied heavily for the 1998 Copyright Extension Act to prevent Mickey Mouse entering the public domain, but as mentioned the copyright duration was already insanely long (70 years) by then.

A friend of mine, Shal Farley, managed to save Empire for the PDP-11 from oblivion. He had a machine that was able to read the old 8" floppy disks, and they read perfectly.

I had a magtape of PDP-10 games, but that sadly was lost.

I put it on github:

https://github.com/DigitalMars/Empire-for-PDP-11

I still think that PDP-11 assembler code is a thing of beauty.

Here's the 1977 version of Empire written in PDP-10 FORTRAN, which I did manage to save:

https://github.com/DigitalMars/Empire-for-PDP-10

Here here!

I make an effort to buy old software on eBay when I come across it, archive it in a stable format scan the media, and then store the originals.

It would be nice to see a project (would archive.org host it?) that applied standard archival rigor (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archivist) to preserving our computing history.

The problem i've had sometimes though is that whenever I try using some old software (which is mostly games as I was born in the 92), I often get stuck in making the game play nice with the current set up, regardless if I run it in compatibility mode or not. I guess I should set up some VMs with older OSes, just for this purpose.

And FYI the correct expression is "Hear, Hear!" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hear,_hear)

> The problem i've had sometimes though is that whenever I try using some old software (which is mostly games as I was born in the 92), I often get stuck in making the game play nice with the current set up, regardless if I run it in compatibility mode or not. I guess I should set up some VMs with older OSes, just for this purpose.

Emulators are also valuable here; the work done on bsnes is amazing, and MAME does a pretty solid job of emulating hardware (including old Mac hardware) accurately.

There's also still quite a lot of retro hardware and books for sale through used markets; enough that people make it their (if not particularly lucrative) business to collect and resell 'vintage' hardware.

History tends to filter out the bad ideas, such that many of the best ideas survive today. However, human's cultural filters are not perfect, and there are lots of good ideas and intellectual context that can be exceedingly valuable to understanding how things became the way they are, or demonstrating alternative paths (which may even be better than what we have today) that did not emerge for market, financial, or cultural reasons.

I really find historical technology to be edifying in the same way political, musical, and broader cultural history is edifying. I think it's a shame that we don't spend as much time teaching technology/design history to software engineers as we spend training 6th graders to understand their local political/cultural history.

I'll check those emulators out.

> I really find historical technology to be edifying in the same way political, musical, and broader cultural history is edifying. I think it's a shame that we don't spend as much time teaching technology/design history to software engineers as we spend training 6th graders to understand their local political/cultural history.

I couldn't agree more. My local Science Center is currently running an exhibit on video games of the past 60 years http://www.ontariosciencecentre.ca/GameOn/, and while I was familiar with most of the 90s and onward ones, it was incredibly cool to walk by and see all the different hardware and games pre-Win 95 which was the first computer I ever used. I would love to go through a curated presentation of the history of other types of software, and see them evolve over the years, see what concepts stuck and what concepts were dropped in time. It would be even better if along actual demos, I could read about some of the quirks that they had to deal with and anything else to give a young one like me more context about those times. EDIT: It was even cooler going there with my younger sister, and reliving some of the fun times we had as kids.

Now that I think about it, a physical exhibit where they can recreate the hardware (even if only on a superficial level of aesthetics), and the rooms and settings where that hardware would have existed, and the software it ran would be incredibly interesting. It would essentially be as close as we could get to a time machine for the foreseeable future. That kind of exhibit would probably become one of my favourites very quickly.

> Now that I think about it, a physical exhibit where they can recreate the hardware (even if only on a superficial level of aesthetics), and the rooms and settings where that hardware would have existed, and the software it ran would be incredibly interesting. It would essentially be as close as we could get to a time machine for the foreseeable future. That kind of exhibit would probably become one of my favourites very quickly.

I agree, that would be fantastic. You see hardware (especially Apple's) show up in fairly prestigious design museums (eg, http://www.moma.org/collection/browse_results.php?object_id=... ), but it's never functioning, much less available to actually use.

You should take a look at Archive.org's Disk Drive project: http://archive.org/details/diskdrives

Yea, different duration of copyright for software is probably also a good idea.

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