There are parts of technology history (frankly, any history) that are thought to be critical to telling the story, and utterly lost. Pieces and fragments will rise up out of the darkness, but a cohesive collection of what once made up a chapter will be thought gone forever.

Sadly, this happens a lot.

But in one special exception, the Computer History Museum found itself with an opportunity to seize the moment.

Compuserve is considered to be the first major online service in the United States. Founded in the era of “time-sharing” services (paying to use a computer during the main owner’s quiet hours), this subsidiary of Golden United Life Insurance moved from 1969 to 1979 in the kind of obscurity befitting a simple business-to-business service providing access to PDP mainframes.

This all changed in 1979 with the rebranding of Compuserve Information Service (CIS), which marketed itself to mainstream computer users, providing chat, games, and storehouses of information for an hourly fee to who ever could afford the phone bills and equipment to do so. It is here that Compuserve (and later services like The Source, America On-Line and Prodigy) brought a bulk of folks online for the first time.

This service flourished through the 1980s and 1990s, and in what should be considered a reductive and surface description of the situation, slowly broke apart via acquisitions, shifting priorities and the dominance of the World Wide Web providing many aspects of what Compuserve had previously done exclusively.

By the time this 2000s-era chapter was over, Compuserve was more a brand and a memory. But it had still reigned in the minds of many as the beginning, the launching pad for a lot of what people came to expect the online world to provide.

It was assumed most of the history of Compuserve was gone – the hardware, software and documentation scattered to the winds.

Not so.

As explained in this blog entry that literally reads like a movie script, the Computer History Museum has acquired, sorted, and added a major amount of Compuserve’s archives to their stacks. The collection had been sitting for decades, and was soon to be disposed of, when it was offered to CHM and they accepted.

Among these items that have been recovered are documents that are being given to the Internet Archive to scan and place online – instructions on how to operate a Compuserve service.

These opportunities to recover assumed-lost materials are extremely rare, but hope springs eternal that in rooms, attics and file cabinets around the world, there possibly lurk further discoveries, and happy endings. Almost like a movie.

11 years ago, on the site longbets.org, a friendly wager was made between two mavens of the web: Jeremy Keith and Matthew Haughey.

The bet, to be revisited a decade and a year later, would be whether the URL of their wager at Long Bets would survive to a point in the semi-distant future.

That is, this day, February 22nd, 2022, (2/22/2022).

As of this writing, the URL absolutely has survived.

Therefore, the Internet Archive shall receive a $1,000 donation from Mr. Keith and Mr. Haughey ($500 apiece), provided from an escrow account that has held the funds since the day of the wager. (We shout out to the Bletchly Park Trust, a worthwhile historical organization, who will not be getting the donation but who are deserving of yours.)

It would be easy enough to declare it a win for the idea of “the web” and that regardless of concerns brought up about the Internet’s ongoing issues, we can still find hope. So certainly, let us all applaud that things worked this way, and the URL’s 11-year consistency is a bright beam of light, online.

In many ways, however, the bet is at best a bittersweet victory, and at its darkest interpretation, a small oasis in a desert.

To understand The Long Bets, you need to understand The Long Now.

The Long Now Foundation is a non-profit meant to be an organization geared towards projects and approaches to thinking that chronologically leave the average human lifespan in the dust; focusing on 10,000-year timelines and solutions to problems of sustaining cultural contexts for a hundred lifetimes and beyond.

Currently, the Long Now and its ideals are expressed in both a very nice performance and drinking space called The Interval, and a number of stylish projects and websites to bring this realm of thinking into focus.

The most prominent and first major project was the Clock of the Long Now, a project to make a time-accurate clock that would function for 10,000 years. The as-yet incomplete project goal is to build a clock deep in a mountain range and set it off, ticking occasionally (but on time, doing so) for the next ten millennia.

Other projects follow this approach as well, ranging from delicious to provoking. A re-imagining of the Rosetta Stone, a language translation service, a manual for civilization, a mountain land purchase, and others in these themes.

Among these variant projects is Long Bets.

It is a facilitation of long-term thinking, of providing a neutral, fair and equitable way for years-in-the-future bets to be made between parties, each contributing funds towards the prize. It is traditional that the recipient of the prizes be organizations not run or controlled by either bettor.

Browsing the betting page, the bets range from the humorous to the aspirational, from specific sports outcomes to predictions around space travel, vehicle autonomy and economics. They’re a joyride of thought and conversation starters, as they’re meant to be.

And among them is Bet #601.

Jeremy Keith and Matt Haughey are both veterans of The Web as it has historically been described; each has had their voices heard to crowds online and off, describing the nature of websites. Their careers have (deservedly) benefitted greatly from the power of interlinked websites.

They both recall the start of the world wide web, as well as internalizing the rules and mores that followed its birth. They were well-qualified to debate on the longevity of URLs and the position that a specific URL would hold across time.

That said, Keith was skeptical. Haughey was optimistic.

Like a lot of its neighbors, Bet #601 is too clever by half; the bet states that it is won or lost depending on the availability of the bet at the URL the bet is hosted at. That is, two situations exist to judge the outcome: Either the URL https://longbets.org/601 exists, at which point the bet is lost, or it does not exist, at which point the bet is won.

(Strikingly, if the bet had been won, the Internet Archive would possibly be the only place to browse the site in its original form, where it would have then helped prove the funds should go to Bletchly Park Trust. The continued reliance on the Wayback Machine as the vault of the Web’s lost memories would have persisted, in a very sharp and slightly less financially-beneficial way. Such is the price of memory.)

For the record, here are the statements made by each bettor about their arguments for the wager:

Jeremy Keith:
“Cool URIs don’t change” wrote Tim Berners-Lee in 01999, but link rot is the entropy of the web. The probability of a web document surviving in its original location decreases greatly over time. I suspect that even a relatively short time period (eleven years) is too long for a resource to survive. I would love to be proven wrong.

Matthew Haughey: Though much of the web is ephemeral in nature, now that we have surpassed the 20 year mark since the web was created and gone through several booms and busts, technology and strategies have matured to the point where keeping a site going with a stable URI system is within reach of anyone with moderate technological knowledge. My oldest sites are going on 13 years old at the time of this bet and the original URL scheme still functions via 301 redirects to a final format we selected about six years ago.

This should be it.

But it’s worth noting how the context of this bet has changed over time. And issues with the continued evolution of the web strike at heart of the point the bet was trying to make.

THE URL:

The Long Now Foundation, intending to maintain its footing for as long as absolutely possible, has a very vested interest in its URLs staying stable. Between hosting structure, the setup of the webpages themselves, and maintaining clean, static URLs (longbets.org/601 is a very simple address, lacking any ornamentation or dependence on programming language extensions or dynamic rendering). The domain name longbets.org is registered until June of 2022 as of this writing, but was registered in June of 2001, twenty years ago, which bodes well for continued survival.

If you’re going to bet that a URL is going to stick around, on a website run by an organization that expresses its character by the longevity of its projects, staking your bet on a specific URL from that organization is a pretty safe bet.

THE WEB:

Both of the parties in the bet clearly think of “the web” as being a set of interacting links between websites, but even by 2011, the idea of a “website” was beginning to experience direct collision with the ever-centralizing, ever-shifting audience of online life. Mobile access is a quirk in the 1990s, an oddity growing into a majority in the 2000s, and now, in the present day, phones with screens are the “home computer” of vast percentages of internet patrons.

In the interconnection of the world, it is harder and harder to think of a “website” where “platforms” rule the roost. A user is more likely to have an account name, or a public identity, than to ever utter the phrase “http” in their daily activity, or maybe even their year. The clear goal of many firms is to dissolve the consideration of the URI or URL, with many of the previous protocols of the earlier Web forgotten. The question becomes less of “will this URL survive” and more of “will the idea of the URL survive?”

THE IDEA OF LONGEVITY AND CHANGE FOR DIGITAL DATA:

Finally, the overarching fact of the situation is that sites like Long Bets are part of a philosophy of the web that is rapidly shrinking. Points of data and dependable signifiers of content and individuals were once the destination. That’s long changed; they are but stops along the way, flotsam and jetsam that ride in nebulous platforms that dominate online life. While Jeremy Keith and Matt Haughey maintain personal websites, they have rapidly become like homesteads that jut out in the center of towering skyscrapers and apartment blocks. Future generations will think of “the web” as much as they think of “the roads”; intensely interest to a few, below the watermark of consciousness to the rest.

As we move into this even-more-ethereal version of the Web, where objects, materials and locations possess data as much as pages and links we ever did, the Internet Archive will do its best to keep up and grow to match the challenge.

But what a challenge it shall be. Bet on it.

Continuing our tradition of releasing new sets of emulated items around the holidays, the Internet Archive has added a new collection: THE JACKPOT LOUNGE.

Previous sets of items, including arcade machines, handheld toys, computer software and flash animations, all represent thousands and in some cases tens of thousands of individual items from history, all playable in the browser.

The Jackpot Lounge is much more focused and refers to one specific group of coin-operated games: Gambling Machines.

Not too soon after video games began replacing mechanical coin-operated games on the midway, bars and other locations, games with a gambling theme or straightforward gambling payouts began to arrive. The same arguments for video games taking over (cheaper maintenance, more dependable, easily upgradable) applied to these potential replacements for slot machines.

While such games would exist in a grey zone for a few years, Poker and Slot/Fruit machines of a video game nature quickly fell under the jurisdiction of gaming authorities in different countries. In some cases, however, it is clear looking through the code of these games that a select few cheated or ended winning runs quickly.

Still, there was little to compete with the complete automation and dependability of these machines, and over time they took over gambling houses and areas where games of chance were legal. Even the venerable and charming mechanical horse-racing games began to fall compared to a simple horse-racing videogame like Status Fun Casino:

As more and more pressure came down to ensure the slot and poker machines had dependable random number generation and payouts, the games became more homogenized, only reflecting changes in sound and visuals while letting the rules stay dependably the same.

From those early beginnings, the increase in quality of sound and video with videogames extends to gambling machines – the colors are bright, the sounds intense, and all are intended to catch your eye and bring you over to play “just a few rounds”.

Reflecting that we are now closing in on a decade of emulation at the Internet Archive, it seems a good time to bring in this class of machines, which have at the start of each game a very complicated start-up process. Reflecting that actual money could be involved with a machine and the tallies of what it was paying out for the day would be very important to a casino, these games have very complicated processes for starting up. By pressing these keys, you are simulating Audit and Jackpot keys being inserted, sign-off buttons are being pressed, and that the metal “cage” door of the machines were closed and locked. Thanks to a set of volunteers, however, these extremely un-intuitive keypresses have been documented for you.

Because of the nature of this genre of machine, many of the 500+ machines will look rather similar: made by the same companies, with only minor modifications to the code to reflect different rules or providing compatibility with gaming commission chips (which would not be manufactured by the game companies, but supplied to them under authority of the commission). Others, however, will seem like strange one-off creations that you can’t imagine attracted anyone to play them – except they did.

One particular fascinating set of machines exists in this collection: Stealth Gambling Machines, meant to look like one kind of video game, but secretly playing another, based on when a secret switch (or secret coin slot) was used. In countries where hosting a gambling machine of any sort held severe penalties. For example, this game acts like Breakout but is actually a poker machine.

And finally, let’s just remember that sometimes, the game is out to get you. The game Tetris Payout will wait until you are winning a bit too much, and then intentionally throw the worst pieces at you to ensure your game comes to an end early.

So go ahead, check out the lounge, and walk through decades of electronic coin-operating casinos. You can’t win real money…. but you can’t lose it, either.

A very large thank you to Xarph and others, who played through these hundreds of machines to learn the by-machine instructions for getting them into a standard playing mode. The process was weeks of work and incredibly appreciated.

If coming into contact with gambling machines causes stress or issues for you or your family, contact Gamblers Anonymous.

An arbitrary but still amazing milestone has passed:

The Internet Archive now has over one million manuals, instruction sheets and informational pamphlets in its Manuals collection. They range into every field of study or product and extend back, in some cases, well past a century!

People have been uploading manuals of every stripe into the Internet Archive for well over a decade, not to mention instruction booklets and related works in collections of partner organizations which are not in the main collection. In the past few years, efforts to mirror both manual repositories out in the world as well as documentation collecting by individuals have put our materials into the stratosphere of this staggering number.

While we gaze upon a nine-digit mountain of manuals, let’s talk about why this is so important and what it means.

Since we’ve had technology and tools, we’ve had instructions on how to use them. Passed along by demonstration, discussion or written forms, the critical link between having possessions and making the most of them has been the unit of knowledge called The Manual.

It’s a very general idea, and one that can range wildly in terms of depth, quality, and approach. Some items hand you a scant single printed page with poorly constructed diagrams. Others are multi-volume tomes that give exacting detail down to the smallest theory of operation. (The manuals for a Boeing 747 airplane weigh more than a 747!)

Considering the manual, one impression might be that they’re only of interest to someone in possession or with interest in the specific item or procedures being addressed.

But manuals are much more than just instructions of operation, or a listing of the components inside a product. They’re windows and insights into the priorities and approaches that companies and individuals take with the tools and goods they sell. And in many cases, the artistic and visual efforts to make an item clear to the reader has led to truly breathtaking visual feats.

With this many manuals and documents, a person trying to find the exact manual they need for something they own will always be a little difficult. Here’s some quick suggestions.

• First try searching for the product name, with just the company and the model number. If the company does not make that many items (as opposed to a large multinational), just putting in the company name may be enough.
• Sometimes there will be just one manual for an entire product family. If so, searching for the company name and the product type (like “Angelcorp CD Player”) will put you on the right track.
• There is also a “Full-Text Search” under the search box you can select which will look inside the documents in the manuals, allowing you to search for model numbers or information in a much deeper way.

Naturally, a collection of this size is rather hard to browse through – there are manuals coming in by the thousands every month, and we are working to get them into proper sub-collections and headings, as well as improving metadata. The work is never done with a project like this, but the joy and wonders never cease.

So enjoy a million manuals, and we’ll see you at two million!

A shout out and deep thank you to all the different communities and individuals worldwide who have assembled manuals mirrored from external sites like manualzzz, manualsbase and iFixit, as well as by uploading in some cases scanning and uploading thousands of manuals to the Internet Archive personally, for being the reason this collection has grown so large.

The recently released video game documentary High Score includes a sequence in the third episode about a game called GayBlade. GayBlade is one of the first commercially-sold LGTBQ-themed video games, a role-playing romp for Windows and Macintosh occasionally referred to as “Dungeons and Drag Queens”. Once thought to have been lost, the game’s software was recently discovered and preserved—and is now available in the Internet Archive!

Although LGTBQ people have been creating video games since the earliest days of the industry, there were very few games before the 21st century that explicitly had LGTBQ themes. Game creator Ryan Best hoped to change that with GayBlade, remarking, “This game gives lesbians and gays—and straight people—a chance to strike back at homophobia from behind our computer screen.”

The game is definitely political, racy and unafraid to make waves, as it definitely did in 1992 when it was released. Players are tasked with exploring a deep dungeon filled with homophobic enemies, trying to rescue the Empress Nelda and return her to Castle GayKeep. Best (and co-creator John Theurer) filled the game with humorous spells, items and antagonists while still keeping it all within the traditional role-playing genre. There are over 13 levels and 1,300 different rooms in this dungeon, reflecting the remarkable amount of work put into it by its creators—truly a unique work of art.

After being lost in a move from Honolulu to San Francisco, the game was thought to have disappeared forever. In High Score, creator Ryan Best laments that he was unable to find any of the game files, and was not very hopeful he would ever find them. But that’s not the end of the story—between the close of filming and the release of the documentary, Best discovered another copy of his game. Thanks to efforts by the LGTBQ Game Archive, Strong Museum of Play, and Internet Archive, it was preserved.

If you want to experience GayBlade for yourself, it’s available in our emulated games collection. You can play it directly in your browser if you’d like, or download the original source code. Additionally, an even earlier LGTBQ game called Caper In The Castro, a mystery adventure dating to 1989, is also emulated in the archive. So hit play and take a look at a little-known slice of LGTBQ history!

The Whole Earth Catalog, a counterculture magazine that lasted from 1968 to 1998, tried many experiments in bringing the goals and nature of their publication to other media.

Published regularly from 1968 to 1972 with additional editions throughout the 70s, 80s, and 90s, Stewart Brand’s magazine covered all sorts of subjects, from nature and politics to technology and human potential. Issues can still be found online and bought used, and are beloved by many, either as a study or just a glimpse into a very idealistic, very technically-oriented view of the world.

The Internet Archive has been hosting a wide amount of references to this project, an index of which is maintained by Robert Horvitz at this item.

One of the many editions was the The Electronic Whole Earth Catalog, a CD-ROM version of the publication produced in 1989.

We have now made The Electronic Whole Earth Catalog emulate inside your browser: Click here to boot up a vintage 1988 Black and White Macintosh running this Catalog.

Weighing in at an impressive 430 megabytes of information, this CD-ROM contained over 9,000 individual pages done in Hypercard, the Web-Before-The-Web version of hyperlinks and document reading created by Bill Atkinson of Apple Computer, and available for Macintosh computers through the 1980s and 1990s. One of the great dead mediums, the power of Hypercard has shown itself to be ahead of its time and providing a deep amount of potential of hyperlinking, one which the World Wide Web would demonstrate.

The Internet Archive has been collecting Hypercard “Stacks” (documents) for years now, in partnership with the site Hypercard Online —a group that has been providing easy ways to upload user-created Hypercard Stacks that might otherwise be very time-consuming and difficult to interact with. As of now, the Hypercard Stacks collection on Internet Archive has over 3,500 examples.

A Quick Tour

Interacting with an emulator acting like a 1988 Macintosh that is then running a CD-ROM’s worth of data as a huge (9,000 page!) Hypercard stack is quite a huge task for a browser, even in 2020. The first issue is the download size and time. Once you click on the “show me the emulation” start button in the preview window, it will take you a while to download all 430 megabytes. For some it’ll be a few minutes, but others may take a whole lot longer.

Once it starts up (with happy mac and the rest), you will find yourself looking at a Macintosh desktop, which has an icon for the Electronic Whole Earth Catalog, which is a floppy disk image named EWEC.

Click on the desktop, double-click on the EWEC “floppy” icon, and it all begins. There’s a file called “Home” inside this EWEC disk, and you click on that to start the show.

In Hypercard, everything is a “Card” and those cards have “Links”, which go to other cards.

You move through indexes of other cards and read what they have to say, sometimes having to click through multiple cards on a single subject. The nature of the cards is very similar to the original approach of the Whole Earth Catalog that it’s drawn from. If you’ve never read a Whole Earth Catalog, it’s usually presented as a series of short articles and pointers to a range of subjects of interest to those who want to be part of the nature of humanity as seen through a techno-hippie lens.

Many of the paths in this collection are meant to be meandering—moving through straight-up indexes as well and unusually laid-out menus and pictures you can interact with. Back in 1989, it was all experimental and new—you’ll find excitement and frustration, eye-opening approaches and confusing bits. That’s the wild and free part of this era, and we encourage you to try it all.

Thanks to everyone who made this happen: Drew Coffman who started a conversation about it, Kevin Kelly who mentioned he had a copy of the EWEC in his possession, and then a bunch of folks who joined in with technical support to turn that copy into an online disk image, and then a emulated Macintosh: Stephen Cole, Noah Bacon, Natalia Portillo, Claudia Dawson, and others.

Now start clicking!