Reanimating computing's past, with the Web - Web Directions

Reanimating computing’s past, with the Web

• By: John
• Tweet: @johnallsopp
• January 30, 2015

Web Directions more or less started as a software company. Well, it was a different company, but the first thing Maxine and I worked on together was software. Some of it (sort of) still works on today’s Mac OS and Windows. But the first software I wrote, Palimpsest, a hypertext knowledge management system, never got ported to Mac OS X (it ran on Mac OS 7 through 9). This is a source of some sadness for me, the thought I’ll never perhaps see a piece of software I spent years writing run again.

But the same story is true for tens of thousands of pieces of software, including, ironically, WWW, the very first Web browser.

However, all this may be changing, via emulation. As JavaScript engines become increasingly powerful, and the hardware running our browsers gets twice as fast every 18 months or so, in there not too distant future we’ll have every version of every operating system running on just about any web enabled device. Imagine, anything with a Web browser running any software every written, simply by visiting a URL. What historian of computing history Jason Scott calls “The Emularity”.

As an example, here’s Windows 3.1 running Netscape 1, in a browser. Read more about that project at Jason Scott’s computing history blog.

The irony is that you’d think being able to run these programs (and similarly play older media like video encoded using Indeo) would be the biggest challenge to reanimating them. But as with the estimated 90% or more of books that are out of print, almost certain never to be printed again, but still in copyright, it’s our intellectual property laws which restrict access to this vast trove of human cultural capital.

Sadly, it’s a situation unlikely to change any time soon. It’s largely thwarted Google’s project to digitise as many of the world’s books as possible, and makes accessing copies of media, games, software that aren’t expressly licensed officially “piracy” in many places around the World. And this in turn has a chilling effect on digital archiving projects everywhere.

The technology part though is largely solved. Our challenge is to get the preservation part right. As Andy Baio, himself an incredible preserver of the Web’s past writes ‘Never Trust a Corporation to do a Libraries Job’. It’s our job.

Interested in the Web’s History?

If you’re interested in the history go the Web, my interactive timeline of major milestones in Web history charts how we got here.

Your opinion:

Images:

The images are downsized due to limited space here. The original dimensions may differ.
Click on the image to open it on a new tab.