5 ms·

Screenshots Forever and Ever Until You Can’t Stand it

238 points by cleverjake 12y ago

rdtsc 12y ago
Ah ZX Spectrum that takes me back. I learned assembler on it, BASIC, had a Pascal and C compiler even (the last two had to load from tape). Made one mistake and had to reload the whole thing again and wait 5 minutes or so. It was amazing how there was this closeness to the machine, you boot right into the programming environment and had to type a command to load a game or do anything. Some of the games I remember were exceptional, Elite was one of them. Just thinking about the ability to pack everything in 48K of memory.
- stevekemp 12y ago
  I got into programming after receiving a 48k spectrum for Chrismas as a child, which arrived with a broken tape deck. No "Hungry Horace" for me, instead it was the (very readable) manual to work through. Happily z80 machine code prepared me well for Intel assembly. Even now I play chaos every month or two: http://torinak.com/qaop#!chaos http://torinak.com/qaop#!chaos along with a couple of other games.
jmduke 12y ago
I've been thinking a lot the past few weeks about the preservation of art and goods in general. I think it comes from two main sources: 1. Maciej Ceglowski (`idlewords) has been talking a lot recently about link rot. Recently, he found that 25% of items pinned a mere five years ago were dead links and 17% from only three years ago were dead [^1]. That's an incredibly high rate -- and, selfishly, one I'm noticing as my bookmark folders for recipes (RIP BroEats.com) and designs and other things is filled with more and more duds. 2. I've been reading Do Not Sell At Any Price [^2], a book about the subculture of 78rpms. These are records that are so rare and so -- for lack of a better term -- unwanted by the vast majority of the music-listening populace that the act of collecting them is less about hoarding and more about preservation. To quote one of the characters in the book (roughly from memory): "It's a weird feeling, holding this thing in your hand and knowing that you could break the song," he said. "I snap this record in half and this song is lost forever. It's a lot of responsibility, and sometimes I think that's why I take it so seriously." I can honestly say that, prior to reading this article, I had no idea what a ZX Spectrum was. Now, after some digging, I do -- and I still have no desire to play one, obtain one, or hold onto it in any meaningful way. (And seeing as I'm usually on the weirdly attached end of the spectrum with these kinds of things, I doubt I'm the only one.) But I'm struck by how important it is to hold onto these things, even if its in a cardboard box in a forgotten closet somewhere or a link on the Internet Archive that gets clicked once every couple decades. I'm not positing that there will ever be a point in time that someone has the hankering to play ZX Spectrum Xtreme Chess, but I think there's inherent value in preserving this ecosystem -- something of a testament to the people who made it, the people who played it, the novelty that at one point in time there were five million living rooms with this machine in it. The Web turned 25 this year, and it's already coming down with acute cases of memory loss. I'm hoping that by the time it hits fifty, the problem won't have gotten worse -- it will have gotten much, much better, not just with URLs but with remembering the time when people played 3D StarFighter by the Oliver Twins. [^4] (This is a very roundabout way of saying the following: Jason, you are completely awesome for doing this, and thanks for sharing it with us.) [^1] https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/501406303747457024 https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/501406303747457024 [^2] http://www.amazon.com/Not-Sell-Any-Price-Obsessive-ebook/dp/B00GEEB9XI/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=undefined&sr=8-1&keywords=Do+Not+Sell+At+Any+Price http://www.amazon.com/Not-Sell-Any-Price-Obsessive-ebook/dp/... [^3] The nice things about IA links is you can pretty reasonably assume that they won't suffer from link rot, right? [^4] https://www.flickr.com/photos/textfiles/14771850314/in/set-72157645599736559 https://www.flickr.com/photos/textfiles/14771850314/in/set-7...
- ijk 12y ago
  > The nice things about IA links is you can pretty reasonably assume that they won't suffer from link rot, right? The catch there being, the Internet Archive retroactively respects robots.txt that forbid crawling, so if someone gets control of a domain they can block the archived pages. This is a big problem with lapsed domains that get swept under the umbrella of a holding company that has lots of domains pointing to the same content, with a blanket robots.txt.
  - walterbell 12y ago
    Have you heard of other caches/archives (e.g. Google) applying the same retroactive policy? Presmably IA has no way of finding out that domain ownership has changed. I wonder if they are applying this policy to pages referenced by Wikipedia, http://blog.archive.org/2013/10/25/fixing-broken-links/ http://blog.archive.org/2013/10/25/fixing-broken-links/ The safest archive of a web page is a local PDF.
    - toomuchtodo 12y ago
      > The safest archive of a web page is a local PDF. Minor quibble: The safest archive of a web page is a local WARC archive: http://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Wget_with_WARC_output http://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Wget_with_WARC_ou...
      - walterbell 12y ago
        Good point, I would say both are needed. The WARC is only useful if there is a matching web browser and operating system in a VM which could render the HTML+Javascript and produce the original layout. PDF/A would mostly retain the browser layout.
    - im3w1l 12y ago
      I use virtual notary for this. You give it a URL, and vn fetches it, and gives you a cryptographic certificate of time of retrieval and website's content at that time.
manifest23 12y ago
One of my first websites was an emulation site in 1999/2000. SNES was by far the most popular category on the site so I had the bright idea to play 2-3 minutes of every single game in order to take a screenshot of the game-play. Three months later I was finally done. Then I lost everything in hard drive crash before I could push the new version of my site live. Dammit.
mwill 12y ago
Jason Scott in general is one of my internet heroes. A lot of what he covers in his work is before my time, so it doesn't carry any nostalgia for me, but appeals on a different level altogether. Books I've read, and classes I took in school, covered the history of the net and computers, but only the things that they feel is 'important', you get the overview of the evolution of programming languages, history of the computer, and timeline of the internet and world wide web. In each case, it feels like it's all about linking one big advancement to the next big advancement. What you get from Jason's documentaries and presentations and sites however, is this really raw and honest look at what real people were actually doing at the time. It's hard to explain why that feels so important to me, but it does.
- mulletboy 12y ago
  If you're interested in the history of the Web and its inception, I highly recommend you this (non-technical) reading [1] by Tim Berners Lee. Really inspiring. [1] http://www.amazon.com/Weaving-Web-Original-Ultimate-Destiny/dp/006251587X http://www.amazon.com/Weaving-Web-Original-Ultimate-Destiny/...
micah63 12y ago
Man, I've been looking for the name of a Sega Genesis game for a long time and couldn't remember it. I just saw it on your site. "Atomic Rob-Kid" was one of the best games I've ever played. Super hard and super frustrating, but it has a great feel! https://www.flickr.com/photos/textfiles/14811059366/in/set-72157646180733361 https://www.flickr.com/photos/textfiles/14811059366/in/set-7... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_Robo-Kid http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_Robo-Kid
ErikRogneby 12y ago
Wow, this is pretty spectacular. I wonder if the copyright office collected information about the platform a game would run on when it was copyrighted? Could probably figure some of it out by the publisher. I might have to go look for that data to mine.

238 points by cleverjake 12y ago

rdtsc 12y ago

Ah ZX Spectrum that takes me back. I learned assembler on it, BASIC, had a Pascal and C compiler even (the last two had to load from tape). Made one mistake and had to reload the whole thing again and wait 5 minutes or so. It was amazing how there was this closeness to the machine, you boot right into the programming environment and had to type a command to load a game or do anything. Some of the games I remember were exceptional, Elite was one of them. Just thinking about the ability to pack everything in 48K of memory.

stevekemp 12y ago
I got into programming after receiving a 48k spectrum for Chrismas as a child, which arrived with a broken tape deck. No "Hungry Horace" for me, instead it was the (very readable) manual to work through. Happily z80 machine code prepared me well for Intel assembly. Even now I play chaos every month or two: http://torinak.com/qaop#!chaos http://torinak.com/qaop#!chaos along with a couple of other games.

jmduke 12y ago

I've been thinking a lot the past few weeks about the preservation of art and goods in general. I think it comes from two main sources: 1. Maciej Ceglowski (`idlewords) has been talking a lot recently about link rot. Recently, he found that 25% of items pinned a mere five years ago were dead links and 17% from only three years ago were dead [^1]. That's an incredibly high rate -- and, selfishly, one I'm noticing as my bookmark folders for recipes (RIP BroEats.com) and designs and other things is filled with more and more duds. 2. I've been reading Do Not Sell At Any Price [^2], a book about the subculture of 78rpms. These are records that are so rare and so -- for lack of a better term -- unwanted by the vast majority of the music-listening populace that the act of collecting them is less about hoarding and more about preservation. To quote one of the characters in the book (roughly from memory): "It's a weird feeling, holding this thing in your hand and knowing that you could break the song," he said. "I snap this record in half and this song is lost forever. It's a lot of responsibility, and sometimes I think that's why I take it so seriously." I can honestly say that, prior to reading this article, I had no idea what a ZX Spectrum was. Now, after some digging, I do -- and I still have no desire to play one, obtain one, or hold onto it in any meaningful way. (And seeing as I'm usually on the weirdly attached end of the spectrum with these kinds of things, I doubt I'm the only one.) But I'm struck by how important it is to hold onto these things, even if its in a cardboard box in a forgotten closet somewhere or a link on the Internet Archive that gets clicked once every couple decades. I'm not positing that there will ever be a point in time that someone has the hankering to play ZX Spectrum Xtreme Chess, but I think there's inherent value in preserving this ecosystem -- something of a testament to the people who made it, the people who played it, the novelty that at one point in time there were five million living rooms with this machine in it. The Web turned 25 this year, and it's already coming down with acute cases of memory loss. I'm hoping that by the time it hits fifty, the problem won't have gotten worse -- it will have gotten much, much better, not just with URLs but with remembering the time when people played 3D StarFighter by the Oliver Twins. [^4] (This is a very roundabout way of saying the following: Jason, you are completely awesome for doing this, and thanks for sharing it with us.) [^1] https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/501406303747457024 https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/501406303747457024 [^2] http://www.amazon.com/Not-Sell-Any-Price-Obsessive-ebook/dp/B00GEEB9XI/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=undefined&sr=8-1&keywords=Do+Not+Sell+At+Any+Price http://www.amazon.com/Not-Sell-Any-Price-Obsessive-ebook/dp/... [^3] The nice things about IA links is you can pretty reasonably assume that they won't suffer from link rot, right? [^4] https://www.flickr.com/photos/textfiles/14771850314/in/set-72157645599736559 https://www.flickr.com/photos/textfiles/14771850314/in/set-7...

ijk 12y ago
> The nice things about IA links is you can pretty reasonably assume that they won't suffer from link rot, right? The catch there being, the Internet Archive retroactively respects robots.txt that forbid crawling, so if someone gets control of a domain they can block the archived pages. This is a big problem with lapsed domains that get swept under the umbrella of a holding company that has lots of domains pointing to the same content, with a blanket robots.txt.
- walterbell 12y ago
  Have you heard of other caches/archives (e.g. Google) applying the same retroactive policy? Presmably IA has no way of finding out that domain ownership has changed. I wonder if they are applying this policy to pages referenced by Wikipedia, http://blog.archive.org/2013/10/25/fixing-broken-links/ http://blog.archive.org/2013/10/25/fixing-broken-links/ The safest archive of a web page is a local PDF.
  - toomuchtodo 12y ago
    > The safest archive of a web page is a local PDF. Minor quibble: The safest archive of a web page is a local WARC archive: http://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Wget_with_WARC_output http://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Wget_with_WARC_ou...
    - walterbell 12y ago
      Good point, I would say both are needed. The WARC is only useful if there is a matching web browser and operating system in a VM which could render the HTML+Javascript and produce the original layout. PDF/A would mostly retain the browser layout.
  - im3w1l 12y ago
    I use virtual notary for this. You give it a URL, and vn fetches it, and gives you a cryptographic certificate of time of retrieval and website's content at that time.

manifest23 12y ago

One of my first websites was an emulation site in 1999/2000. SNES was by far the most popular category on the site so I had the bright idea to play 2-3 minutes of every single game in order to take a screenshot of the game-play. Three months later I was finally done. Then I lost everything in hard drive crash before I could push the new version of my site live. Dammit.

mwill 12y ago

Jason Scott in general is one of my internet heroes. A lot of what he covers in his work is before my time, so it doesn't carry any nostalgia for me, but appeals on a different level altogether. Books I've read, and classes I took in school, covered the history of the net and computers, but only the things that they feel is 'important', you get the overview of the evolution of programming languages, history of the computer, and timeline of the internet and world wide web. In each case, it feels like it's all about linking one big advancement to the next big advancement. What you get from Jason's documentaries and presentations and sites however, is this really raw and honest look at what real people were actually doing at the time. It's hard to explain why that feels so important to me, but it does.

mulletboy 12y ago
If you're interested in the history of the Web and its inception, I highly recommend you this (non-technical) reading [1] by Tim Berners Lee. Really inspiring. [1] http://www.amazon.com/Weaving-Web-Original-Ultimate-Destiny/dp/006251587X http://www.amazon.com/Weaving-Web-Original-Ultimate-Destiny/...

micah63 12y ago

Man, I've been looking for the name of a Sega Genesis game for a long time and couldn't remember it. I just saw it on your site. "Atomic Rob-Kid" was one of the best games I've ever played. Super hard and super frustrating, but it has a great feel! https://www.flickr.com/photos/textfiles/14811059366/in/set-72157646180733361 https://www.flickr.com/photos/textfiles/14811059366/in/set-7... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_Robo-Kid http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_Robo-Kid

ErikRogneby 12y ago

Wow, this is pretty spectacular. I wonder if the copyright office collected information about the platform a game would run on when it was copyrighted? Could probably figure some of it out by the publisher. I might have to go look for that data to mine.