Advent of Computing - Episode 152 - LIVE at VCF - Reviving Retro Panel

Episode Date: March 2, 2025

A special treat from VCF SoCal. While visiting I had the chance to host a panel on restoration and preservation. I was joined by: David from Usagi Electric (https://www.youtube.com/@UsagiElectric) Rob from Souther Amis (https://www.southernamis.com/) Jim, Former Executive Director Computer Museum of America (https://computerhalloffame.org/home/about/)

Welcome back to Admin of Computing. I'm your host Sean Haas and I'm back from vacation. At least mostly. Took a little break so I could go down to VCF SoCal this year and have a little time to rest and recover. I'm here to report I had a great time. I want to thank everyone who came out to meet me at VCF SoCal and especially people who came out to see my talk, my panel, and the live interview I did. I had a wonderful weekend, and it was a real delight to meet everyone. I say mostly back because today you get a live episode. This is a recording of my reviving retro panel that I hosted at VCF SoCal. Now some warnings at the top. The

audio, since it's a live recording, is a little different than my usual standard. There's also a Q&A segment at the end. This year we didn't have a wireless mic going through the crowd, so some of the questions are a little poor quality as far as the recording goes. I've preserved those here because I think you can hear the questions and I think the discussion around those questions is worth listening to. So bear with me. If it sounds bad, I've tried to fix it. This is my best shot. As far as normal programming goes, I'm going to be back in two weeks with a regularly scheduled episode. I already have that started. I began normal

production schedule today. But if you can't wait, I actually just finished recording a bonus episode over on Patreon. So if you want to get that, you can go to my Patreon, you can get to that via AdrinOfComputing.com, sign up for just $1 a month, you get the new bonus episode and a handful of older ones. With that said, allow me to go to my associate, Sean, in the past to open the reviving retro panel. Enjoy. Hello everyone. Thanks so much for coming to the panel. I'm going to be moderating this afternoon. My name is Sean Haas. With me I have David from Usagi Electric. I have Rob from Southern Amis. And I have my man Jim, the former executive director of the Comp Museum of America. So I think just to start off, I want each of you to do a little more extension to that introduction.

So let's start with you, David. But you're in the hot seat. You get to go first. I'm in the hot seat. Oh, great. That's why you guys left this chair open before I walked up. That is correct. All right.

My name is David Lovett. I run a YouTube channel called Usagi Electric. I work on really old, weird esoteric stuff. The stranger, the harder it is to fix, the better. Most notably we recently got a Bindix G15 from 1956 up and running and even playing some Christmas music out of it, which I think classifies it, I might be wrong, but I'm going to keep saying this until somebody corrects me. I think it is currently the oldest running digital computer in America, which is a pretty

well thing to think about. So check out the channel if you want to see more on that. Thanks, Ray. Hi, my name's Rob Sherman. I run Southern Amos projects. This was brought together basically to preserve and restore and run BBS programs specifically to the Atari platform. It's branched out to go towards restoring as well as preserving and protecting not just hardware but also

floppies. So we've become one of the largest intakes of floppy disks and converting to digital media and preserving those for use in the community. My name is Jim Trageser. I was with the Computer Museum of America in San Diego from 1985 to 2006. We had a facility downtown San Diego at C and 6th Street for a while, two-story, 9,000 square foot building with a lot of the collection on display. In 06, we lost our primary funding from the Coleman College Foundation, and at that point, the collection of both hardware and software and manuals was donated to San Diego State University where it sits in the basement of the library safely out of the elements.

It is in a climate-controlled environment, and we are hopeful that eventually at least portions of it will come back on exhibit. All right. So how about we start off with a softball, something that they won't hurt at all. Sound good? Guaranteed to hurt. So we're talking about restoration and of course preservation.

I want to talk about the other side of that. Why are we doing this restoration? So to that end, what in your opinion is the biggest danger facing the state of hardware and software today that we're trying to preserve and keep up and running? I know softball, right? Age, right?

I mean, that's the number one problem. And talent, basically, to be able to understand and to be able to go back in time and to look at what was this originally? So if you're looking at basic code, in my case, say, you know, BBS software, most of it written in basic. It's gone through many different hands. It's gone through many different iterations and it's gotten its own personality to it. But what was it originally and do we look

at, you know, how we can compare and preserve it as it was in many different states? Or do we look at it as original with documentation to original, and then making it available to the community? So I think most of it that I look at is compatibility, because you want these things to be usable. You don't want to just turn around and say, well, I restored this, so this is what the code looks like, and it's going to sit on a shelf somewhere. It's really about bringing it back to its

original form and then making it usable to a community and keeping it going, because, I mean, after my generation, my children aren't going to do what I do. I'm hoping someone else will. So when the Computer Museum of America was open in San Diego, we were a living museum in that when you came through the front door, we had a big sign that said, please, do not keep your hands to yourself. We had a robe, about five or six Apple IIs that were running. We had, we called the Amazing Wall of Capro, where the students would come through and

type up a document in WordStar and have to code boldface, italics, and underline. We had Commodores and Ataris. And to that end, because these things don't last forever, we had a lot of duplicates so we could cannibalize them. Because the museum closed, we didn't have to deal with that long-term erosion or just degradation, I guess. But a useful analogy to old computers is old airplanes. And there's a lot of old airplane museums, but there's only one that still flies them. But they have to do a lot of work to keep them in flying condition, and they won't be able to fly forever.

Now, what's interesting is if you're super rich, you can go in England and buy a brand new Supermarine Spitfire reproduction made to the original specifications with a few modern things like GPS and stuff that they insist on, but otherwise it is identical to the Supermarine Spitfires that were built in the 30s and 40s, and that will last a lot longer. So it was intriguing to me to see the Apple or the Mac classic cases out there that somebody has made in a translucent plastic, because the plastics in a lot of cases are what will give out. And then the media, the floppies, the cassettes, the paper, well the paper tape might outlast everything. The punch paper tape and the punch cards. Nothing is forever. No technology

lasts forever. But to tell the story of the computer revolution, it's nice to have some of these machines when the kids would come through, the sixth graders would come through the museum and we would sit them down at the K-Pro and ask them to type up what they saw on the wall and WordStar. The first question was where's the mouse? But at the same time, facilitating that experience and allowing access to these machines does put a lot of wear and tear on it. The other side of that is if you're not using it, these machines just tend to deteriorate on their own on a shelf. All right. I'm feeling a little fighty today. You asked

why. And the answers that you guys gave are great. But I feel like there's not a high enough level of an answer to that question going on. And the question really is why. For example, I put a phenomenal amount of effort into restoring a computer, mini computer that I have called the Centurion mini computer. I love it. It's one of my favorite, all‑time favorite machines. I've met a lot of the people that used to work at Centurion, but ultimately this machine is less than insignificant in the larger umbrella of computing history.

It was a blip that made zero impact on the overall story of our history. So as far as like preserving the importance of computing history, I absolutely should not have done this machine. And there are actually people that are upset that I gave this machine as much love and attention as I did because of how insignificant it is. I should have been putting my energy towards something that was more important to learning the history, which loops us back around to the question of why? Why did I do this? Which is what my wife asks

me. Why did you spend all that money? No. The answer, I think, is you have to get pretty philosophical and pretty high level to it. And I think if I try to look at things through the glasses of is this historically significant, like 99% of the stuff that I'm going to be able to get my hands on, with the exception of the G15, is not. Even the LGP21 out there is kind of an insignificant blip. It was a cost reduced version of something else that was more important. But the real answer is it excites me. There's so much more to like learn, particularly

with like in the 50s and 60s and 70s because it was the wild west. Nobody knew the correct answer to anything. And so everything was on the table. And I think that's the important part. Not the significance of the machine itself, but the story of the humans that were trying to figure out this incredibly difficult problem. And the machine is a vessel for figuring out that story of the humans. Yeah, I think that's really well put.

To pivot for a minute, Rob, I have a question for you, which we can open up once I get your answer. You do a lot of software restoration. That's a big part of your overarching project. Yeah, talk about insignificant. I mean, BBS is for Atari computers. Sorry. I may have put a bit of a downer on this. That's my fault. I'd like to know, how do you think software restoration differs in approach from hardware restoration? Because these are pretty diverse fields, but you have to do both to really make it into these kinds of projects.

When you're working on hardware, you've got a schematic, you've got parts list, you know exactly where you're going to probe and look, and you're trying to find that failure. In software, because software has character, it's got personality of the coder, and you're trying to find that failure. In software, because software has character. It's got personality of the coder. And you're trying to understand, first of all, the mindset of when into this and the different elements that come into that software equation that goes, this is what I needed to do.

This is what the original writer, the coder, meant it to do But you know, how do I make this so that it it's still meaningful but it's usable and that's where I'm going to keep pressing on is because It's great that this stuff was made and it had its purpose in 1970 or 1980, right? But if somebody's not going to take it into their hand today and either look at it, improve it, work it, use it, host it, run it, whatever it might be, I really want to understand that publisher, coder, slash, meaning of that software. And I want to get

back to what that was original. And the thing about BBS is that it is a snapshot in time. So when I get a hard disk from someone or a set of disks from a size up, basically I'm looking at like 1983 message boards and the personality of 1983 and the 12 year old self, right, like me at that time, that wrote this crazy stupid message and was fighting back and forth with someone like it was on the internet today, right? Nothing's changed.

And nothing's changed. It's exactly the same. But it has so much that it speaks to. And so this way, when I'm looking at the code and I'm looking at a restoration, my passion for bringing it back online is to show all of that. So, yes, I look at each one of these restorations as being very different, but based upon having a personality to it, having the culture and that snapshot in time, and what it means to the people that used it at one point in time.

BBS's were more, at least I don't know about every part of the country, but I actually wrote the weekly San Diego online column for Computer Edge Magazine from like 89 to 95 when the web really kind of made the BBSs culturally obsolete. They'd already been technically obsolete, I suppose. But we had over 500 dial-up bulletin boards just in San Diego County, and that's quite a high penetration, I think. Some of them obviously were busier than others. I did learn that any bulletin board whose name or whose SISOP name was Papa Smurf was to be avoided.

Not sure what was going on there. But there were a ton of bulletin boards to every single type of community. And it really was an early, rage quitting has a long history, not necessarily noble. But I think bulletin boards did set the table for the internet because the people who were designing the software that runs the internet were heavily influenced by the bulletin boards. And then you come full circle to, right, where did it all start? It started with people like you in the room, right, where we got on a bulletin board, downloaded a bunch of pirate

wares, played a bunch of games, talked about it, had community and shop and all of those things. But all of that software moving around, all of that became the beginning of what we unfortunately have in social media today. Sorry about that. Well, I'm trying to keep that kind of, that soft aspect of the computer experience preserved in any way is so difficult because it's not, there's not a schematic for how to be a 12-year-old on a bulletin board. You have to kind of look at the edges of that.

What about you, David? Do you have some thoughts on software? Oh man. I'll take that as a no. Oh boy, this is gonna sound like a gross overgeneralization, but I feel like there are This is going to sound like a gross over generalization. I feel like there are two kind of camps here. There's the hardware exists in service of software.

And software exists in service of hardware. So I'm a hardware guy through and through. I love the hardware. And if I can solve a problem in hardware, I'll do that even if it takes me like extra weeks just so I don't have to write any code. Like I'll go out of my way to not have to deal with software. And in my sad little realm of this, the software is merely a vessel to get the hardware to do things. It's all about experiencing the hardware for me. But I also realize that there's another camp to this and that the hardware exists to make the software do certain things. And so the ‑‑ it depends on where you want to approach it from. So for me, man, I was born in 1984, so I missed the BBS world.

I didn't get to experience that. And being born in 1984 and having an interest in machines from the 50s, 60s, and 70s means that there's zero nostalgia aspect here. I didn't ‑‑ it was like 1995, I was playing anarchy online with my friends and whatnot, right? I guess I would have been like 99, but whatever. Like very different worlds, right? So the hardware, this is going kind of back to what you said, it was like, you know, software has a personality.

Hardware also absolutely has a personality. You can see it in power supply design even. So like if anybody's ever worked on a power supply designed by DEC, Digital Equipment Corporation, you realize what pain is. And if you work on a power supply designed by somebody else, you realize, oh, that's how it's supposed to be done. So you can see the personality of these engineers come through in every aspect of the machine,

whether it be from hardware or software. And it just so happens that hardware is what really gets my fire lit. And ultimately that's what it comes down to. What lights your fire? And if it's 12-year-olds arguing it on BBSs in the 1980s, that's a strange fire, but I'm glad that fire exists. That's a little back and forth on hardware and software, but I think there's a secret third leg to this discussion, so to speak. That's documentation.

Okay. So I put this to all of you. Do you have any documentation in maintaining these systems that stands out as maybe awful or maybe something you lived and died by? I see you. It's all bad. You're cracking up. Yeah.

What's that? All documentation's bad? No, no, no. Is that the quote? The stuff that I end up looking at, you know, like Amos, which is Atari Message Information System, has a history going back to like 1982. It started with the guys out of Michigan that were the Atari club that decided

that they were going to build on CBBS, which was the original Christian Ward kind of BBS scene. And the documentation that they wrote was, talk about 12 year old sort of mental, it's like kitchen speak, but worse. So, you know, it's disconnected in some places, there's a lot of typos, because there's no spell check. It's, you know, typed on, you know,

most likely like a manual IBM or something, and we got the images of it, and they're all stored on Internet Archive, by the way. But the software with the documentation is so key, because again, like I said, for the personality, you could tell a lot about what was going on during the time, but it also gives you those little hints about what the original, right scope of the software was. But, you know, documentation

was the last thing that a coder in my little niche sector here thought about. And it was like, oh, I have to do this because I don't want people asking me a whole bunch of questions. And they were terrible at it. But, yeah. What's interesting, too, is a few years ago we were talking to some of the big software publishers, Electronic Arts, the vintage software publishers, Broderbund, places like that. Almost none of them saved source code for the games. So we don't know what the thought process was when they were writing, say, Track Attack, which was one of Broderbund's first games. I saw running

out there with the train going around. EA didn't save the source code for Larry Bird versus Dr. J one-on-one. They were just erasing stuff and moving on. It was survival. So from an academic standpoint, it seems like in the future, people that are studying that era and trying to understand how did we get to where we are because the past doesn't form the future. It's a very poorly preserved area because we won't know, not only do we not know

if they left good comments in their code or not, we don't even have the code. So we have the executables, we can recreate it, you know, deport it, but we don't have the original source code written by the programmers because it's always been such a forwarding helter-skelter industry. And so I think that's going to be a hole in the future because nostalgia has a shelf life, right? Yeah, absolutely. The jazz station in San Diego has restarted

a Sunday morning big band hour, which I love, but I didn't grow up listening to Glenn Miller. I mean, I wasn't born yet when Glenn Miller died flying to France. Neither was he. So people that are listening to Count Basie now or Duke Ellington or Glenn Miller, it's not nostalgia, it's young jazz fans that are

going back and discovering it, and I think that's where computers won't – there's not going to be anybody that used an Atari as a kid at some point in time, and anybody that's doing it is a young person exploring it. And for that reason, the preservation can be important, because we won't have the oral history with us anymore. So on the topic of documentation, having been involved with the museum, I think this is a question I would like to ask, if you don't mind. Go for it.

Documentation is big, heavy, and takes up a lot of space. So what is your feeling on preserving the original paper documentation versus scanning it, assuring that we have a digital archive of it, and then pushing the original documentation into a storage unit? Or worse comes to worse, destroying it?

I would think there's value in keeping it as long as possible, because there is a tactile experience to grabbing a book that's different than your Kindle. And so, especially in the 80s, you had the software manual would be this big thing and a three-ring binder. When I was in Ireland about 20 years ago, I toured the big university there, Trinity College in Dublin. And that's where they filmed the – that's what they made into the Hogwarts library. And you get in there on the tour and you realize

that almost all of those books are bound together now as string. Paper doesn't last forever. It doesn't. Papyrus doesn't last forever. So the scanning will be critical. But I would still like to keep – and we did keep it at the Computer Museum, we still have them there. There's many manuals, magazines, newsletters from local user clubs, all of that stuff is we could get. But scanning it in obviously gets it to a wider audience, it's easier to share, but I do think there is a tactile

experience of grabbing a CPM manual, popping it open and saying, wow, what were they doing? Well, and there also is, to hijack your question, there's a tactile aspect, but there's also, sometimes the medium tells you a lot about the information, like Ted Nelson's book, Computer, Live, Dream, Machines. You can look at a PDF of that and get one impression, but how it's typeset is meant to be

read in one direction and then you physically flip over the book and read it in another way. That you can't really do that with a PDF or in my collection I have a bunch of people's computer company zines and I've read all of those scans online but I didn't realize how thin the paper was until you get it. And it's this crumbly newsprint that was mimeographed very haphazardously. You don't get that from a PDF. So it's like looking at 12-year-olds arguing on a BBS. Why did I mention that? I have no idea.

That's going nowhere. You're never going to live down. So obviously, like, there are no original copies of the Greek classics. What we have are the copies of the copies of the copies. I think there might be two or three original Shakespeare-era copies of his works still extend, but we still know about him. So obviously, I think it comes back to having, making the digital copies of it, storing it in a way. But digital storage doesn't last forever either.

So we've got to figure that out moving forward too. So this was a conversation I had with somebody just a few days ago. And if you want data to be stored for a long time, there is no better medium than paper. How often do you come across a 100-year-old book? How often do you come across a 100-year-old book? How often do you come across a 200-year-old book? How easy is it to restore magnetic data from 1970? Right? A 100-year-old book, I can pick up, I can look at the text on it, I can read it, I can

parse the data that's in it. A MagTape from an obscure system from 1969 requires a team of people and a colossal amount of effort to decode and get that information back. The reason I brought it up in regards to documentation is that I physically don't have the space to store documentation. A lot of people offer me documentation, particularly with DEC, because DEC apparently employed 7,000 writers and they just wrote tomes of information. They have an internal publishing house. It's amazing.

It's ridiculous. It's insane. So people, do you want this DEC stuff? And it's for like a Vax that I've never even laid hands on. And I'm like, no, I do not, because I don't have the physical space for it. So that was kind of where I was coming with from it, because I rely very heavily on the digital copies, even though I know that digital storage is fleeting. I rely on that simply because I don't have enough income to build the 4,000 square foot warehouse

that's going to be required to store all the deck data, all the deck material. Well, that's where I think you need the balance of having some institutional involvement, of having a museum. Library of Congress would presumably have most of that stuff on file. The Smithsonian obviously has huge warehouses. So I think there's a role there that the institutions can better play than the private collectors. Going back for a minute to the topic of restoration, we discussed how documentation isn't the best all the time. So what do we do when documentation fails? How do we approach keeping something running if the documentation either, A, doesn't exist, or B, is just riddled with typos and inconsistencies. Yeah, I mean that comes with the expertise of a community.

So you take blocks of code, you share it between the group. I mean we use Discord, there's some modern elements to this. Where in the Atari community, just like the 8-bit community for Commodore or other, we've got emulators that help us to be able to debug and to be able to utilize some modern tools to be able to fix code, adjust things, test, sandbox, and then bring it down to what we believe is going to be the best representation of that preserved software. There are some guys that are still around, but they don't

want to be involved anymore, so you ask questions. It's amazing. On LinkedIn, you can find just about anyone that put their name as publishing on a bunch of this stuff, right? But they don't want to hear from you. They don't want anything to do with it.

Atari, say for example, like Keith Ledbetter, he wrote some of the best BBS software commercially available as well as into the public domain along with terminal programs and all that stuff. Guy was fantastic, did a huge service to the community, doesn't want to talk about it anymore. Bob Puff, same thing, and others. But you just have to, again, you got to dig in and talk to people that used it originally, and you bring the community together and you

make your best effort at it. And from what I'm hearing too is that you're documenting that moving forward, so now you can still create the documentation from the oral history and the practical, hands-on stuff as well. Some knowledge is going to be lost. There's no way around it. So this was like a real deal legitimate problem that we ran into when we did the Centurion. So I got this mini computer and there was literally zero documentation. And now through the wonders of making 40 YouTube videos on it, I've completely decimated Google's

search engine optimization. So you can only ever find my stuff on the Centurion now. So there was, like I said, it was an insignificant blip, so nothing got saved. But now we have schematics for the CPU 5, the CPU 6, the multiplexer card, the floppier controller, disk 1, disk 2, we have schematics for all of this. We have a full list of the assembly language that's used for the CPU 6 which is ridiculous because it was like in the 80s when they were in competitions to see who could have more op codes. It's like 1,100 op codes which is dumb and doesn't make sense. But we have all of this documentation now. And it wasn't located. We created it. So the schematics were from group efforts to reverse engineer the boards

by beeping them out and tracing them out by hand. The op codes were done from building disassemblers and emulators and disassembling the assembler that was assembling the code. I didn't do that. It all goes out to the community, these people that are just brilliant, rallied behind it. We've created new documentation for this machine that didn't exist and that's allowing us to go further and further and deeper and deeper on it. So even if documentation is completely lost, if the drive is there and the equipment exists, new documentation can be created. That is definitely a Herculean effort to say the least. It was like three years.

You know what's funny about all this too? People do this for free. We just do this. Hang on, it's not for free, it's for fun. It's for fun. We do it because we enjoy it. We do it actually for more than just fun because there is a community and there is a responsibility to do these things. So it's not just a matter of, look, hobbyist

is one thing, right? You know, being just sort of chronically over obsessive is another. There's a medium that's in here that brings people together to talk about it, collaborate on it, fix it, make it work, and get the enjoyment from seeing it, right? Reproduced, documented, shared, preserved, you know, and people using it. So yeah, I agree, there's fun in it, because if there's not a problem with most of these things, it's not fun, right? Watching it run is, well, what good is that? I want to break it and fix it again. I don't necessarily want to see it just in its stable state. Somebody else wants that.

But that's sort of the way that I look at this is that just like anything that I do for a living or anything that I work for, I want to see those cycles produce value. I don't want to see it present in the way of money or monetary gain for it. And that's the gift of giving back to right computering or the legacy of all of these things, the people that came before it, and making sure that their hardware and their

software is available for the next generation, whether they want to use it or not. I want to pass around one last question before we open it up to the audience. This is a word that I think all three of you have used, so it's my turn. Where does emulation fit in to this larger picture? For being lazy. Oh, is that it? When the hardware will no longer run, that will be the only option. Although I was talking to Lee last Friday night about this. I said, you know, they wrote me under this panel where I know nothing. And he goes, yeah.

But he made an interesting observation. All computers are emulating. Earliest calculators are trying to emulate the human capacity to count. So if you look at it, the MCI was backwards reverse engineered to run out there software. So almost from the beginning of the microprocessor, large scale emulation has been going on for a variety of reasons.

I actually like emulation despite been going on for a variety of reasons. I actually like emulation despite my bad joke. If you think about everything that we're sort of touching on, right, where you are utilizing some form of, you know, like FujiNet as a new network adapter, right, that's creating emulation, it's mimicking dish drive, you know, network device, you know, keep going, right? I think we have to rely on a lot of that given the fact that our efforts are to continue to use these things in more of a modern form. And also, not to forget the appreciation for some of these emulators where there is a tremendous

amount of effort put into it, again, creating like, you know, if anybody's ever used Elterra, which is the Atari emulator, Avery Lee is, I mean, I can't even imagine the amount of time that he has spent in emulating an OS, emulating devices, you know, taking it to every degree of every accessory that could ever be bolted on and emulating that so it could work on a modern PC. And it's really truly incredible work, but it also helps in preservation, right? Like I said earlier, you can debug using it.

It's got specific tools that aren't available directly on old hardware. And again, to preserve the hardware, because you can't run it for 24 hours a day, seven days a week, emulation has a place. It definitely does. And I think when we come back to the example I used earlier about the modern Spitfire reproductions, as the hardware starts to die, we may see reproductions, because again, it comes back to if you were playing Atari back in the day with that horrible little square Joystick there's a tactile Sensation that you're not going to get running that same software on a modern PC

Well, we already are seeing in pretty large scale recreation hardware I mean the halls this weekend has been full of it and some of it is very, very impressive like the Aquarius Plus as just a really good example. So in 1985 if you had an Atari ST which cost about a thousand there was a large port on the left that almost never got used. There was a guy in Colorado, David Small, issued this piece of hardware called the Spectre GCR from Gadgets by Small. I see heads nodding. If you could locate Mac ROMs, because the Atari ST and the Mac and the Amiga all use

the same 68,000 Motorola CPU. If you could source Mac ROMs, there was a slot for two ROMs on the Spectre board, you plug those in, you slide it in there, and you boot it up, and now you're running a Mac. It would no longer read your Atari disks, it would only read Mac disks. Now, Apple didn't like this because they wanted 2500 for a Mac SE. So they put restrictions on all the licensed Mac dealers that any time you did a memory upgrade on a Mac, you had to mail them back those ROMs or you lost your license. But they didn't do that in Canada. So the Canadian Mac company, Apple dealers were doing great money running classified ads in American computer magazines. So my dad being an engineer wanted to have this. So he got this so he could run the Mac OS on his Atari ST. Why? Because he wanted to run Mac software? No, no, no. Dad had a copy of soft PC which allowed you to

run DOS on your Mac. Because my father, being an engineer, wanted to run Word Perfect for DOS on his computer because he didn't like WordPerfect for Atari. That's why he was running DOS on a Mac on his Atari. So there's emulation. It's never gone away. Let's go deeper. David, I know you have some opinions about the reword. All right. I have an interesting view on emulation. Again, a lot of my stories centralize around this thing because it was my life for like four years. When I got it, it has a hard drive in it called

a hawk drive made by a control data corporation, CDC. It's a big 14 inch platter, weighs about 160 pounds, 150 pounds, has an amazing 10 megabytes of storage. Like you're literally like you're measuring your storage capacity in pounds per megabyte. And it was in very rough shape. Like it had crashed so bad the heads were ripped in two and there was a whole lot of other stuff going on with it. And I had actually managed to find a couple more of these and they were all in questionable state as well. And everybody kept saying, you know, you should just emulate the hard drive. You know, because emulating drives

is not a completely unknown field that people are emulating MFM drives and there's blue scuzzy and all these other options for emulating drives. And I kind of looked into it and I was like, mm, F that. It's just easier for me to fix the drive. So for this broken bit of meat up here, I looked at all the software that would have been required to emulate a hard drive and it was literally easier to repair the hard drive for me. So we did. I repaired the hard drive, spun it up, got the heads flying on it and we're using it. I've

had one of these drives at VCF Southwest and they're not without their difficulties because it's Southwest. We had a ‑‑ we had the servo control board fail so I had to replace that with 20 people watching and we had to do a head alignment with 20 people watching. So I'm here on the floor like sitting on my knees trying to do a head alignment on this thing while people are like, what is this maniac doing? Right? And then later that night we had a head crash and so the next morning we pulled it all apart and we cleaned the platter, wasn't through the oxide, cleaned the heads, put it all back

together, spun it back up and I'm still using the drive as it sits. So this, for me it was like emulation is a tool to keep the hardware alive. So emulation allowed us to develop the tool set that we used to do head alignments on that drive. Because I don't have a CE alignment pack which is normally what you would need to do a head alignment on that. So instead we use a tool that we designed and developed in emulation and now we run separately that shows us whether we're getting good clean reads off of that. We just use a data pack to align the drive. Not the best way to do it. I don't

recommend it. If that's all you got, that's all you got and that's what you do. Everything that we've worked on since then, the Benix G15, we have an emulator that allows us to test things out, trial them before we go out and we flip the switch and we try it on the real deal machine. Because a lot of times especially if you're developing new software for these languages that you're trying to write in, you'll write something, you go out and you spin everything up, you load it up, you test it and you go,

God damn it, it didn't work. So you spin everything down, which is like a 30 minute process up and a 30 minute process down. And then you go back in and change one line of code. So your options are do I leave the drive spun up with the heads loaded all day long. No, you just develop it over and over and over on emulation and then you move it over to the real machine when you're ready to write it on the real hardware, so I think

emulation is incredibly important as a tool to keep the hardware alive For as long as we possibly can That's meandering was that meandering no that was good So with that I think we have time to open it up to some questions from the audience. So if anyone has any questions they'd like to ask, hey. Oh sorry, I'm not the host. I'll leave. You though. That was a good call. Looking longer term, 30, 40 years from now, do you think preservation is what's become more difficult

given how physical media is being phased out and rights repairs become more difficult and being able to access some of these hardware, integrated circuitry or integrated hardware. Do you think, given that your preservation will continue, how will it adapt to those challenges in the future? Are you talking about preservation of stuff that's being made right now? Yes.

So that's interesting because I have this crazy Russian guy in Escondida who owns a stereo repair shop I take my reel to reel to, And he's got a stack of very recent vintage widescreen TVs and he says you cannot fix the boards on those. So I hadn't thought about that, but yeah, I think you're right. With everything being integrated like that, it's going to make it much more difficult and more challenging. I'm hoping for the Blade Runner version of archiving, like three-dimensional. I just came across this, and for myself personally, I have this really wide laser disc collection. I put everything back together, I got this laser active Sega setup like from Pioneer and all that. And the Sega thing works and then I go and I pop in a laser disc and it won't read, it won't do that.

And I'm looking at all this and everything's off wobble, right? Every one of these laser discs I own is now completely warped like, you know, some bad vinyl. And, you know, in thinking about like all the physical media, thinking about, you know, in thinking about like all the physical media, thinking about you know, forget about floppy disks and stuff like that. DVD, Blu-ray, right? 4K and all that. You know, somebody's going to invent something that's really perfected for making sure that these things that we use in everyday life in one form or another are preserved in the right way. And you know, look, when we were users back in 70s, 80s, sorry, I'm older than you, there was this great brand of disc called Elephant Memory Systems,

and it's the worst disc for preservation. That one fails. But an elephant never forgets. The ants are so good. Yeah, but these do, and every other disc that I get, like, you know, and so we know, right, these medias, these specific types of media, right, how they act. I mean, certainly paper, you know, and that aspect has always been great. And I agree with that whole side of it.

But I'm an enormous fan of the Internet Archive. I think the work that they're doing and what they're contributing to in scanning and imaging and even creating emulation online to run things online inside the archive is incredible. Please donate to the archive if you get a chance to, if you can, appreciate that. And I think people like that in think tanks

that are outside of government and outside of people like us, they're going to come up with the right solution for this. And it'll be a long-term solution that handles both things in our past and things current today and future. Yeah, right there. I saw you trying to do that again. Library of Congress, for all the recordings and everything Yeah, right there. I saw you trying to do that again. machine they made for engraving those. What were they called?

Those were those radio station records that were like 16 inches. They only went to the radio stations. They were a long play at 78 RPM. They still had those platters. Do we just call them turn tables? those platters. So I think for your question right quick, I think I can't really talk about the software side of things because I'm a hardware guy. But I think preserving things that are like this kindle, that's a hard one to think about, but 40

years from now somebody is going to lose their gourd over this thing and be like oh my God it's a vintage 2024 Kindle. Right? I hope not. We're in a weird timeline, man. But I think if you look at the things that hobbyists are doing today, I absolutely think that the progression of technology and the progression of hobbyists' capabilities will keep up with being able to keep hardware like this alive. You have people like Sam's aloof or breaking taps doing photolithography in their ‑‑ essentially in their basement, like hobbyists that are creating not quite nanometer but very, very small silicon, they're growing silicon in integrated

circuits in their basement. This is crazy. This is stuff that was bleeding edge just 20 years ago, 30 years ago. These guys are doing it as a single person. So 30, 40 years from now I absolutely think that hobbyists will be able to rip this kindle apart and put new components into it or create whatever the modern equivalent of a FPGA chip is right into that and keep it going. Now whether they get the software going is out of my hands. Let's go to the next question. First of all I want to compliment David for preserving Motorola's one bit microcontroller, vacuum tubes. Yes, there we go.

So I guess I have two questions on that. Do you see someone with a computer museum 30 years trying to preserve the UV1? Oh, the thing that I built? Yes. Oh, good lord, no. No. It's like, it's terrible.

It's really bad. I think it's a cool piece of artwork and it's a piece of kinetic artwork which was kind of my goal with it from the beginning. I am a huge fan of kinetic artwork. And I think in that sense I achieved the goal. But I don't view it as something that should be preserved behind glass or something. It's not groundbreaking or special in any way. I do think that it would be really exciting to see a museum preserve the WDR1. And if you haven't heard of this machine, it was a ‑‑ the WDR was a radio station in, I think it was a radio station or TV station

in Germany. And they ran a series on building a homebrew computer using the Motorola MC14500. And there's very, very precious few examples of this thing existing. But it, and it's a terrible computer because it's not a great microprocessor. That was like late 70s I want to say. I would need to sit down with Google to tell you for sure. Oh did you live in Germany in the 70s? Okay so you you it's do you are you familiar with the WDR broadcasting thing? I'm not sure. Anyways, I would love to see that preservation of the MC14500 continue. You in the back. offhand to like a problem with the communication and other files is enough.

You have scares or a storage or a map from the 60s. And do you think that the kind of, you know, theorization of like file formats like the PDF or JPEG is going to help in the long run or are there sort of hidden costs that we're kind of paying right now for this? You know, like, opening a PDF and putting it in a post file like the Word doc is already kind of hitting the mess. Do you think that would be easier in the future on that,

or would you sort of hang it off with these? I mean, look, Adobe and PDF have sort of become the standard. And so when we image and we do converting, we also end up with the optical character recognition inside the engine from Adobe. So there are some benefits. I don't really know if long term, because of the commercial licenses associated with PDF, how that ends up hurting or helping or maybe not.

Certainly you'd like to be able to see that these things that are preservations in the public domain don't have the same requirements as a corporation that's buying thousands of licenses for their users. But I'm not really that sure of that aspect of it. I know that Internet Archive, those files are in PDF form. So I'm not sure how their licensing arrangement works but hopefully it's a donation. Once a format exists, I mean, I use Word Perfect X2 at home because it still works. And I can open and save a Word Star format document if I need to. So once a format exists, it exists. And if it's got a popular base, I don't

think we'll ever lose them. Also, don't ever underestimate the power of a pissed off hacker. If you take this format away, there's somebody out there that's going to be like, oh, yeah, watch this. Yeah, yeah, right, exactly. I'm looking at the documentation, and it's more perfect until version 8. You said the entire fight code specification will allow for it in the user manual.

Postscript is the same way you create Postscript documents right now. I think PDF is kind of similar. Unless something is open enough. There's no secret. PDF is a Posts are kind of similar. I don't think it's open enough. There's a little secret. PDF is supposed to be on the inside. It's just binary, compressed poster, really. Yeah, so they've got an open standard, HTML, right?

You can create a document in HTML. We found our pissed off hacker. There he is. I have a question answered in the long run. All right, who is next? I think it's all you. Yeah, so you mentioned that like a floppy disk or something like that. Obviously for a floppy disk it does slowly agree over time but there's modern techniques like like flux capture, how do you think that future software

is going to be preserved? Now we're all on SSDs and we're getting encryption and wear leveling is more common. Is there even going to be a future where we're going to be able to play off those devices? Yeah, well, go back to the pissed off hacker. Yeah, you're definitely going to, I think the Grease Weasel is an outstanding device.

I think the ability to be able to force through floppies and things like that to handle things in the past. Software as it's developed today, the level of encryption obviously is absolutely insane. And I think that that's to our benefit, because we have an illusion of safety that comes from that, because we've also got personal interest and personal information that's there.

You know, I'm not sure, like if you took a look at like Apple's plan for preserving every aspect of OS X and iOS, like how they look at someone outside of Apple controlling that or getting that or preserving it. I believe that most corporations believe it is their job. And you know, you go back to companies like Avnet, they got a museum right in the corporate headquarters. There's people that are interested in doing it, but it's not gonna be in the same interest as you'd like to see in your access to it, I would say.

Look, there's so much money wrapped up in software today and in code, but chances are within the next two years, maybe a little bit further than that, you're gonna type into CHAP GPT, I want the code for this, and you'll be able to pop it into your emulator and run it. The concept, you mentioned encryption and you mentioned it as well. The concept of encryption in like the 60s and 70s is laughable today, right? Like

anything that was encrypted in the 70s people can generally crack in like.3 seconds, you know, just even like brute forcing it, right? So the encryption today is incredibly tough but I'm no expert here. I'm not even a novice here. But the concepts and ideas that quantum computing are pushing is changing our entire view on encryption. So 40 years from now, 50 years from now, I can very much so see quantum computing or even something, some other type of computing or some other type of tackling

these things cracking our concept of encryption wide open. So that 40 years from now if I need to pull encrypted data off of this Kindle, I have this tool set that can do it in point three seconds. And so I think 40 years from now the tools that we're going to have at hand are going to be ridiculous. thing about corporations saving things. Number one, there is a propensity among hardware designers, I know, because I was one for 38 years. We hated the right document. Absolutely the last thing we wanted to do. Therefore, it was the last thing that was done generally about the time the budget ran out. So your documentation is usually very poor for that. Number two, if it was written there was a lawyer somewhere saying

look we want to minimize the amount of documentation we have sitting around that might cause us grief in the future. So we wouldn't write things into source code that, well we did this because such and such. Well such and such might embarrass the corporation. So get rid of that. So there's a lot of reasons for that. Three, it costs money to store things. Corporations don't want to spend money that they're not going to see a return investment. They protest. We've worked for a company for 30 years. We built equipment that allows corporations

to make medical advances. Okay, those people rely heavily on having a documentation because here you are in the middle of the night and suddenly something's not working. You want to be able to... I was not on a pager. My previous job for a newspaper, I was on a pager all the time. They needed that. Their production would stop because that machine that I wrote the documentation for was used for two purposes, one for research and the other for production. So if they couldn't make the test of that machine, their product line stuck. They could not release the product. I gave my documentation, including everything that was an error in my documentation, in my program, was in the manual. Every single one.

Every time I made a release, any time I had any sort of error or condition, it was in that manual because we wanted to protect our customers. I think, like I said, I think you're both right because I've seen really good documentation and really horrible documentation. I think it was a company by company. If the lawyers were in charge, you got lousy documentation. Yeah.

Also, it sounds like medical stuff is very, very mission critical. Like, if even the slightest thing goes wrong, people die. So I can understand how there was a much stricter drive for that. This was not medical equipment that we were selling. This was equipment that tested medical devices. Okay. They had to be qualified. Which even more important than the actual medical equipment.

Yeah, even more important. That's very mission critical stuff. Anything that touched the body, we did not do. We tried it once and said never again. Because of the paperwork and everything that had to be done. But we needed to keep our customers happy. And in our marketplace, we had one other major competitor that everybody complained about. Because they had poor documentation.

Yes. See, your lawyers knew you were getting sued no matter what. That's right, that's right. That's right. All right, well I think with that, that puts us at time. So I want to thank you all for coming out. Thank you guys so much. Yeah, thanks so much.

Applause.