3 ms·

It's not BS and you've laid out why. There are games and software on 5.25 and 3.5 disks that we can't access now. Even if we could, the software was written for

It's not BS and you've laid out why. There are games and software on 5.25 and 3.5 disks that we can't access now. Even if we could, the software was written for a world that doesn't exist anymore and we've have to write other software to adapt them to our machines now. This isn't a problem that is just going to go away, formats and OSes and hardware will come and go as our technology needs and abilities change.

Udik 12y ago
First, you're talking about a very short timespan right at the beginning of the digital age. Even if we were to lose everything, a missing 20 years timespan (1975-1995) of videogames wouldn't amount to a digital middle age. Second, https://archive.org/details/messmame https://archive.org/details/messmame
- romaniv 12y ago
  I don't know about digital dark ages, but before GOG this was a serious problem. It's not that games were not accessible at all, it's that it was so hard to access them that most people would not bother. Are you really "preserving" history if it's just some CD in a box no one ever opens?
  - Udik 12y ago
    You are. Most of our history has been preserved in books that were inaccessible to almost everybody and that nobody opened for hundreds of years. The important thing is that things are preserved somewhere, even if to read them you need a fully equipped laboratory and boffins in white gowns. That's how we read our most ancient documents anyway. Once the information has been retrieved and copied, it's safe.
    - romaniv 12y ago
      I think you are confusing history with archeology. They are obviously related, but they are not the same thing. Preserving history requires keeping it alive. Those books you speak about were endlessly copied and read. I am willing to bet that most of you know about history you have learned from articles or books of people who read other books, and so on. Archeology steps in when history ends up as a CD-in-a-box or tablet-in-a-tomb. And even then we often loose context and meaning.

Udik 12y ago

First, you're talking about a very short timespan right at the beginning of the digital age. Even if we were to lose everything, a missing 20 years timespan (1975-1995) of videogames wouldn't amount to a digital middle age. Second, https://archive.org/details/messmame https://archive.org/details/messmame

romaniv 12y ago
I don't know about digital dark ages, but before GOG this was a serious problem. It's not that games were not accessible at all, it's that it was so hard to access them that most people would not bother. Are you really "preserving" history if it's just some CD in a box no one ever opens?
- Udik 12y ago
  You are. Most of our history has been preserved in books that were inaccessible to almost everybody and that nobody opened for hundreds of years. The important thing is that things are preserved somewhere, even if to read them you need a fully equipped laboratory and boffins in white gowns. That's how we read our most ancient documents anyway. Once the information has been retrieved and copied, it's safe.
  - romaniv 12y ago
    I think you are confusing history with archeology. They are obviously related, but they are not the same thing. Preserving history requires keeping it alive. Those books you speak about were endlessly copied and read. I am willing to bet that most of you know about history you have learned from articles or books of people who read other books, and so on. Archeology steps in when history ends up as a CD-in-a-box or tablet-in-a-tomb. And even then we often loose context and meaning.