Author Archives: Jason Scott

Puzzling Pictures at the Decentralized Web

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Normally, I’m Jason Scott, Free-Range Archivist at the Internet Archive… but at the quickly-approaching Decentralized Web Summit being hosted at the San Francisco Mint, I’ll be your puzzle emcee overseeing a fun event and contest that takes place all over the building.

Called “Puzzling Pictures”, we will have six paintings hung up on the walls. It’s fun enough to find where we hung them, but contained within these paintings will be multiple layers of puzzles, leading to destinations online at the Archive, and ultimately, we will have a chosen winner of the top-level puzzle. This winner will have a charitable donation of cryptocurrency donated in their name to the charity of their choice.

The puzzle was designed by LoSTBoy (aka Ryan Clarke), who has designed contests for the DEF CON hacking conference and the Mr. Robot television show; the paintings are done by international lowbrow contemporary artist, Mar Williams. Mar will be attending the conference and will be auctioning off the paintings in a silent auction throughout the event.

It’s a challenging set of puzzles, so be sure to seek me out (I’ll be in a top hat and some crazy outfits) to work on them, and have fun!

Spam Faxes and the Wonders of Ephemera

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In 2002, a father in the UK gathered up a pile of fax paper from his fax machine and took it home. Was he looking at some treasured writings and gathered cultural touchstones and wanted to preserve them? No, he had gotten a pile of spam faxes and wanted to bring the paper home so his kids could have something to draw on the back.

Decades later, he found the box and scanned in the contents.

And that’s how we have the 2002 Junk Faxes Collection. Over 500 pages of fax-based spam messages gathered from across a few months in 2002.

For the younger members of the crowd; Fax machines used to be very ubiquitous, and calling a lot of random phone numbers would reveal fax machines by the dozen, connected to all sorts of businesses. Many companies would also list their fax machine numbers as part of their information. For some industries and areas, a fax number was even mandatory for transactions. (And still are, in some cases!)

This, therefore, became an attack vector for all sorts of sales departments, political mailers and scammers. People could send, basically, anything. And they did!



The faxes are scanned and readable in the item in our online book reader; going to full-screen mode turns them into a very readable exhibit of pitches, come-ons and scams from the UK around that period of time.

This is an example of the power of ephemera, the parts of life and culture that are normally meant to be used for a short time, or disposed of quickly. Even though the faxes were intended to convince a small portion of the receiving audience to sign on or throw away the faxes, having them all in one place brings all sort of unintended value. We see what priorities existed for sales, what items cost, and what sorts of things could be bought. Some of the spams, like the ones asking “Yes or No”, are mostly intended to cause reaction or to call a for-pay “voting” line, but the choices and language will be of use to historians and researchers.

Thanks to Rob for keeping this material all these years, and taking the effort to scan them and bring them online!

Some Very Entertaining Plastic, Emulated at the Archive

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It’s been a little over 4 years since the Internet Archive started providing emulation in the browser from our software collection; millions of plays of games, utilities, and everything else that shows up on a screen have happened since then. While we continue to refine the technology (including adding Webassembly as an option for running the emulations), we also have tried to expand out to various platforms, computers, and anything else that we can, based on the work of the emulation community, especially the MAME Development Team.

For a number of years, the MAME team has been moving towards emulating a class of hardware and software that, for some, stretches the bounds of what emulation can do, and we have now put up a collection of some of their efforts here at archive.org.

Introducing the Handheld History Collection.

This collection of emulated handheld games, tabletop machines, and even board games stretch from the 1970s well into the 1990s. They are attempts to make portable, digital versions of the LCD, VFD and LED-based machines that sold, often cheaply, at toy stores and booths over the decades.

We have done our best to add instructions and in some cases link to scanned versions of the original manuals for these games. They range from notably simplistic efforts to truly complicated, many-buttoned affairs that are truly difficult to learn, much less master.

They are, of course, entertaining in themselves – these are attempts to put together inexpensive versions of video games of the time, or bringing new properties wholecloth into existence. Often sold cheaply enough that they were sealed in plastic and sold in the same stores as a screwdriver set or flashlight, these little systems tried to pack the most amount of “game” into a small, custom plastic case, running on batteries. (Some were, of course, better built than others.)

They also represent the difficulty ahead for many aspects of digital entertainment, and as such are worth experiencing and understanding for that reason alone.

Taking a $2600 machine and selling it for $20

The shocking difference between the original sold arcade stand-ups and their toy store equivalents can be seen, for example, in the Arcade Game Q*Bert, which you can play at the Archive.

The original Arcade machine looks like this:

And the videogame itself looks like this:

Meanwhile. some time after the release of the arcade machine, a plastic tabletop version of the game came out, and it looked like this:

Using VFD (Vacuum Fluorescent Display) technology, the pre-formed art is lit up based on circuits that try to act like the arcade game as much as possible, without using an actual video screen or a even the same programming. As a result, the “video’ is much more abstract, fascinatingly so:

The music and speech synthesis is gone, a small plastic joystick replaces the metal and hard composite of the original, and the colors are a fraction of what they were. But somehow, if you squint, the original Q*Bert game is in there.

This sort of Herculean effort to squeeze a major arcade machine into a handful of circuits and a beeping, booping shell of what it once was is an ongoing situation – where once it was trying to make arcade machines work both on home consoles like the 2600 and Colecovision, so it was also the case of these plastic toy games. Work of this sort continues, as mobile games take charge and developers often work to bring huge immersive experiences to where a phone hits all the same notes.

The work in this area often speaks for itself. Check out some of these “screenshots” in the VFD games and see if you recognize the originals:

Naturally, these simple screens came packed in the brightest, most colorful stickers and plastic available, to lure in customers. The original containers, while not “emulated” in this browser-based version, definitely represent an important part of the experience.

A Major Bow to the Emulation Developers

The efforts behind accurately reflecting video game and computer experiences in an emulator, which the Archive then uses to provide our in-browser Emularity, are impressive in their own right, and should be highlighted as the lion’s group of the effort. Groups like the MAME Team as well as efforts like Dolphin, Higan, and many others, are all poking and prodding code to bring accuracy, speed and depth to software preservation. They are an often overlooked legion of volunteer effort addressing technical hurdles that no one else is approaching.

While this entry could be filled with many paragraphs about these efforts, one particularly strong example sticks out: Bringing emulation of LCD-based games to MAME.

Destroying The Artifact to Save It

In the case of most emulation, the chips of a circuit board as well as storage media connected to a machine can be read from non-destructively, such that the information is pulled off the original, returned to place, and these copies are used to present emulated versions. An example of this might be an arcade machine, whose chips are pulled from a circuit board, read, and then plugged back into the board, allowing the arcade machine to keep functioning. (Occasionally, an arcade machine/computer will use approaches like glue or batteries to prevent this sort of duplication, but it is generally a rare thing, due to maintenance concerns for operators.)

In the case of an LCD game machine, however, sometimes it is necessary to pull the item completely apart to get all the information from it. On the MAME team, there is a contributor named Sean Riddle and his collaborator “hap” who have been tireless in digging the information out of both LCD games and general computer chips.

To get the information off an LCD game, it has to be pulled apart and all its components scanned, vectorized, and traced to then make them into a software version of themselves. Among the information grabbed is the LCD display itself, which has a pre-formed set of images that do not overlap and represent every possible permutation of any visual data in the game. This will make almost no sense without illustrations, so here are some.

When playing the LCD version of the game “Nightmare Before Christmas”, the game will look like this:

That is a drawn background (also scanned in this process) that has a clear liquid-crystal display over it, showing Jack Skellington, the tree, and an elf. The artistry and intense technical challenge as both the original programming/design and the recovery of this information becomes clear when you see the LCD layer with all the elements “on” at once:

This sort of intense work is everywhere in the background of these LCD games. Here are some more:

 

(There are many more examples of these at this page at Sean Riddle’s site.)

Not only must the LCD panel be disassembled, but the circuit board beneath as well, to determine the programming involved. These are scanned and then studied to work out the cross-connections that tell the game when to light up what. The work has been optimized and can often go relatively quickly, but only due to years of experience behind the effort, experience which, again, comes from a volunteer force. Unfortunately, the machine does not survive, but the argument is made, quite rightly, that otherwise these toys will fade into oblivion. Now, they can be played by thousands or millions and do so for a significant amount of time to come.

The Fundamental Question: What Needs to be Emulated?

Floating in the back of this new collection, and in the many new LCD and electronic games being emulated by the MAME Team, is the core concern of “what will bring the most of the old game to life to be able to experience and study it?” With “standard” arcade games, it is often just a case of providing the video output as well as the speaker output and accepting the control panel signals either through a keyboard or through connected hardware. While you do not get the full role-play of being inside a dark arcade in the 1980s, you do get both the chance to play the original program as well as study its inner workings and the discoveries made in the process. Additional efforts to photograph or reference control panels, outside artwork and so on are also being done to the best available amount.

This question falls into sharp focus, however, with these electronic toys. The plastic is such a major component of the experience that it may not be enough for some researchers and users to be handed a version of the visual output to really know what the game was like. Compare the output of Bandai Pair Match:

…to what the original toy looked like:

The “core” is there, but a lot is left to the side out of necessity. Documentation, research and capturing all aspects of these machines will be required if they are to be ever recreated or understood in the future.

It’s the best of times that we are able to ask these questions while originals are still around, and it’s a testament to the many great teams and researchers who are bringing these old games into the realms of archives.

So please, take a walk through the Handheld History collection (as well as our other emulation efforts) and relive those plastic days of joy again.

Shout Outs and Thanks

Many different efforts and projects were brought together to make the Handheld History collection what it is. (We intend to expand it over time.) As always, a huge thanks to the MAME Developers for their tireless efforts to emulate our digital history; a special shout-out to Ryan Holtz for his announcements and highlighting of advances in this effort that inspired this collection to be assembled. Thanks to Daniel Brooks for maintenance of The Emularity as well as expanding the capabilities of the system to handle these new emulations. Sources for the photographs of the original plastic systems include The Handheld Games Museum and Electronic Plastic. (It is amazing how few photos of the original toy systems exist; in some cases Ebay sales are the only documented photographs of any resolution.) As a reference work for knowing which systems are emulated and how, we relied heavily on the work of the Arcade Italia Database site. Thanks to Azma and Zeether for providing metadata on images and control schemes for these games; and a huge thanks to all the photographers, documenters, scanners and reviewers who have been chronicling the history of these games for decades.

Emulation in the Browser adds WebAssembly

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Since we introduced our approach to Emulation in the Browser (now simply called The Emularity) back in 2013, there’s always been plans to continually improve the experience and advance the various web technologies that make it happen.

As of today, the Internet Archive now has a majority of emulated platforms running in WebAssembly.

What is WebAssembly?

Webassembly (or WASM) is meant to be a replacement for the “executed programs in the browser” aspects of Javascript. It is designed from the ground up to be open, widely supported, and taking into account all the lessons learned from 20 years of Javascript. The benefits include speed advantages, improvements in the code size and transfer, and being much easier to debug. It is a result of years of work, and can almost be considered a “do-over” from the lessons learned by Javascript.

What do I need to do?

You actually don’t need to do much at all! WebAssembly, if it’s enabled in your browser, will just start being how the program loads when you emulate something at the Internet Archive. (The loader will mention a “WASM Binary” when it’s loading up your emulation.) If you don’t have WASM or you’ve disabled it, the usual Javascript loading will happen, as it always has. There is support for WASM in the Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Brave and Edge browsers.

Our DOS, Windows, and Macintosh emulations are still running the older system with Javascript as the language. WASM support is now in places like the Console Living Room, Internet Arcade, and our support for platforms like the Apple II or the ZX Spectrum.

Also, if this is the first time you’ve become aware we’re emulating over 80,000 software titles in the browser.. well, you have a lot of software history to look forward to.

Thanks to Dan Brooks and everyone on the Emularity team for helping to advance us to the next level, as well as the many people working on the WebAssembly standard, to ensure software history is one click away.

We’re always interested in bug reports, or noticing strangeness, so definitely mail me at jscott@archive.org if you run into issues or want more information.

30 Days of Stuff

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Jason Scott, free-range archivist, reporting in as 2017 draws to a close.

As part of our end-of-year fundraising drive, I thought it might be fun to tweet highlighted parts of the vast stacks of content that the Internet Archive makes available for free to millions. A lot of folks know about our Wayback Machine and its 20+ years of website history, but there’s petabytes of media and works available to see throughout the site. I called it “30 Days of Stuff”, and for the last 30 days I’ve been pointing out great items at the Archive, once a day.

You won’t have to swim upstream through my tweets; here on the last day, I’ve compiled the highlighted items in this entry. Enjoy these jewels in the Archive’s collection, a small sample of the wide range of items we provide.

Books and Texts

  • The Latch Key of my Bookhouse was one of the first books scanned by the Internet Archive in its book scanner tests, and it’s a 1921 directory of Children’s Literature that is filled with really nice illustrations that came out great.
  • As part of our ever-growing set of Defense Technical Information Center collection, we have The Role of the Citizens Band Radio Service and Travelers Information Stations In Civil Preparedness Emergencies Final Report, a 1978 overview of CB Radio and what role it might play in civil emergencies. Many thousands of taxpayer-funded educational and defense items are mirrored in this collection.
  • Also in the DTIC collection is The Battalion Commander’s Handbook 1980, which besides the crazy front page of stamps, approvals and sign-offs, is basically a manager’s handbook written from the point of view of the US Army.
  • There are hundreds of tractor manuals at the Archive. Hundreds! Of all types, languages (a lot of them Russian) and level of information. Tractors are one of those tools that can last generations and keeping the maintenance on them in the field can make a huge difference in livelihood.
  • A lovely 1904 catalog for plums called The Maynard Plum Catalogue was scanned in with one of our partner organizations and it’s a breathless and inspiring declaration of the future wonder of the plums this wizard of plum-growing, Luther Burbank, was bringing to the world.
  • Xerox Corporation released “A Metamorphosis of Creative Copying” in 1964, which seems to function as both promotion for Xerox and a weird gift to give to your kids to color in.
  • In 2014, a short zine called The Tao of Bitcoin was released, telling people the dream of $10,000 bitcoin would be real.
  • The 1888 chapbook Goody Two-Shoes has lovely illustrations, and a fine short story.
  • Working with a lovely couple who brought in a 1942 black-owned-businesses directory, I scanned the pages by hand and put them up into this item.
  • Inside that directory was an ad for a school of whistling that said it taught using the methods of Agnes Woodward, and a quick scan of the Archive’s stacks showed that we had an entire copy of her book Whistling as an Art!
  • The medical treatise Sleep and Its Derangements, from 1869, is William A. Hammond, MD’s overview of sleep, and what can go wrong. Scanned from the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, it’s one of many thousands of books we’ve scanned with partners.
  • Let Hartman Feather Your Nest could be described as “A furniture catalog” in the same way the Sistine Chapel could be described as “a place of worship”. The catalog is a thundering, fist-pounding declaration of the superiority of the Hartman enterprise and the quality and breadth of furniture and service that will arrive at your door and be backed up to the far reaches of time.

Magazines

  • Photoplay considered itself the magazine for the motion picture industry in the first part of the 20th century, and this multi-volume compilation of photos, articles and advertisements is a truly lovely overview.
  • There’s over 140 issues of the classic Maximum RockNRoll zine, truly the king of music zines for a very long time. On its newsprint pages are howls and screeches of all manner of punk, rock and the needs of musicians.
  • A magazine created by the Walt Disney Company to trumpet various parts of Disneyland and its attractions was called Vacationland, and this Fall 1965 issue covers all sorts of stuff about the park’s first decade.

Movies

  • Rescued from a warehouse years ago, a collection of Hollywood movie “B-Roll”, unused secondary scenes often filmed by different crew, has been digitized. My personal favorite is [Western Film Scenes], which is circa 1950s footage of a Western Town, all of it utterly fake but feeling weirdly real, to be used in a western. Don’t miss everyone standing around looking right at you and looking like they agree quite energetically with you!
  • No compilation could be complete without the legendary Duck and Cover, a cartoon/PSA that explained the simple ways to avoid injury in a nuclear blast. Just lie down! It’ll be fine. Please note: This Probably Won’t Work. But the song is very catchy.
  • The very weird Electric Film Format Acid Test from 1990 has a semi-interested model holding up a color bar plate in a wide, wide variety of film and video formats. Filmed just a few blocks away from the Internet Archive’s current headquarters.
  • I snuck in a 1992 interview with the Archive’s founder, Brewster Kahle, back when he was 33 and working at WAIS, a company or two before the Archive and where he is asked about his thoughts on information and gathering of data. It’s quite interesting to hear the consistency of thought.
  • The Office of War Information worked with Disney to create “Dental Health“, a film to show to troops about proper dental care. It’s a combination of straightforward animation and industrial film-making worth enjoying.

Audio

  • We have a collection of hours of the radio show The Shadow from 1938-1939, starring  Orson Welles at 23, at the height of his performance powers, playing the dual main role.
  • For Christmas Eve, we pointed to “Christmas Chopsticks”, a 1953 78rpm record of “Twas the Night Before Christmas” performed to the tune of the classic piano piece “Chopsticks”; one of tens of thousands of 78rpm records the Archive has been adding this year.
  • On Christmas, a user of the Archive uploaded two obscure albums he’d purchased on eBay – remnants of the S. S. Kresge Company, which became K-Mart, and which were played over the PA system for shoppers. He got his hands on Albums #261 and #294.
  • Earlier in the month before the user uploaded those Christmas albums, I linked to a different holiday collection of K-Mart items, a 1974 Reel-to-Reel that started with a K-Mart jingle and went full holiday from there.
  • Before he was a (retired) talk show host, and before he was a stand-up comedian, David Letterman worked and trained in radio. Happily, we have recordings of Dave Letterman, DJ, from when he was 22, at Ball State University.
  • Ron “Boogiemonster” Gerber has been hosting his weekly pop music recycling radio show, “Crap from the Past”, for over 25 years, and he’s been uploading and cataloging his show to the Archive for well over 10 of those years, including all the way back to the beginning of his show. The full Crap From The Past archive is up and is hundreds of hours of fun.
  • The truly weird “Conquer the Video Craze” is a 1982 record album with straightforward descriptions of how to beat games like Centipede, Defender, Stargate, Dig Dug, and more. This album has been sampled from by multiple DJs to bring that extra spice to a track.
  • Over 3,000 shows at the DNA Lounge are at the archive, including “Bootie: Gamer Night“, which combines mash-up tracks and video games. Bootie has been playing at DNA Lounge for years, and puts the audio from one song with the singing from another, and… it’s quite addicting, like games. This night was for the nearby Game Developers’ Conference being held the same week.

Software

  • In 2011, as part of a “retrocomputing” competition, we saw the release of “Paku-Paku”, a pac-clone program which ran in an obscure early PC-Compatible graphics mode that was very colorful and very small (160×100) and was built perfectly for it. You can play the game in your browser by clicking here.
  • Psion Chess is a game for the Macintosh that can play both you and itself with pretty high levels of skill and really sharp and crisp black and white graphics.  It makes a really great screensaver in self-playing mode.

People often overuse a phrase like “Barely scratched the surface”, but I assure you there are millions of amazing items in the archive, and it’s been a pleasure to bring some to light. While the 30 Days of Stuff was a fun way to stretch out a month of fundraising with stuff to see every day, we’re here 24/7 to bring you all these items, and welcome you finding jewels, gems and clunkers throughout our hard drives whenever you want.

Thanks for another year!

HyperCard On The Archive (Celebrating 30 Years of HyperCard)

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On August 11, 1987, Bill Atkinson announced a new product from Apple for the Macintosh; a multimedia, easily programmed system called HyperCard. HyperCard brought into one sharp package the ability for a Macintosh to do interactive documents with calculation, sound, music and graphics. It was a popular package, and thousands of HyperCard “stacks” were created using the software.

Additionally, commercial products with HyperCard at their heart came to great prominence, including the original Myst program.

Flourishing for the next roughly ten years, HyperCard slowly fell by the wayside to the growing World Wide Web, and was officially discontinued as a product by Apple in 2004. It left behind a massive but quickly disappearing legacy of creative works that became harder and harder to experience.

To celebrate the 30th anniversary of Hypercard, we’re bringing it back.

After our addition of in-browser early Macintosh emulation earlier this year, the Internet Archive now has a lot of emulated Hypercard stacks available for perusal, and we encourage you to upload your own, easily and quickly.

If you have Hypercard stacks in .sit, .bin.hqx, and other formats, visit this contribution site to have your stack added quickly and easily to the Archive: http://hypercardonline.tk

This site, maintained by volunteer Andrew Ferguson, will do a mostly-automatic addition of your stack into the Archive, including adding your description and creating an automatic screenshot. Your cards shall live again!

Along with access to the original HyperCard software in the browser, the Archive’s goal of “Access to ALL Knowledge” means there’s many other related items to the Hypercard programs themselves, and depending on how far you want to dig, there’s a lot to discover.

There are entire books written about Hypercard, of course – for example, The Complete Hypercard Handbook (1988) and the Hypercard Developers’ Guide (1988), which walk through the context and goals of Hypercard, and then the efforts to program in it.

If you prefer to watch video about Hypercard, the Archive has you covered as well. Here’s an entire episode about Hypercard. As the description indicates: “Guests include Apple Fellow and Hypercard creator Bill Atkinson, Hypercard senior engineer Dan Winkler, author of “The Complete Hypercard Handbook” Danny Goodman, and Robert Stein, Publisher of Voyager Company. Demonstrations include Hypercard 1.0, Complete Car Cost Guide, Focal Point, Laserstacks, and National Galllery of Art.”

Our goal to bring historic software back to a living part of the landscape continues, so feel free to dig in, bring your stacks to life, and enjoy the often-forgotten stacks of yore.

Macintosh Collection Hand-Screenshotted… Plus: HyperCard!

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The Internet Archive’s emulated Early Mac collection, which was announced last week, has had all its content screenshotted by hand for maximum visual beauty and accuracy.

Normally, we utilize a set of automated scripts that do screenshotting, allowing for a large amount of uploads to be visually described, but the combination of many different permutations of where to click and which folders to open meant we weren’t getting the best shots for each item. Now, they’re doing justice to the unique and interesting early Mac experience.

Like many other cases in computer history, the seeming limitations of black-and-white-only screens on early Macintoshes gave rise to truly beautiful and complicated art, which expressed itself crisply on the 9-inch monitors.

Response to the early Macintosh collection has been resoundingly positive; thanks again to all the volunteers who helped the system work as well as it does. With 60+ titles added and more to come, this is likely to be one of our most memorable and stellar playable software collections on the Archive.

But one more thing….

Throughout the testing process and discussions about emulating Macintosh, a steady drumbeat of requests could be summarized as: “What about HyperCard?”

HyperCard, a hypertext authoring system for the Macintosh, is a legendary environment for creating “Stacks”, which were clickable cards with a wide range of options and features. It is absolutely the inspiration for what ultimately became the World Wide Web.

It was possible to write truly complicated and complete applications in HyperCard, and stacks allowing everything from reference books to games to music – whatever the authors of stacks could come with. It was particularly popular with academics and writers. A great retrospective of HyperCard at its 25th anniversary was written by Ars Technica.

So.. what about HyperCard? Yes, we have HyperCard.

The Emularity Loader utilized by the Internet Archive allows the combining of the content of two items in the Archive’s collections, meaning there can be a “general boot disk” with HyperCard, and then pulling in an uploaded Hypercard Stack.

As of this writing, we’ve added a small number of Stacks to prove the technology, including the “BeerStack” beer-reference, the Adventures of Sean (an interactive cartoon), and a re-created Stack designed by none other than Douglas Adams for calculating the volume of a Megapode nest.

Adding new stacks is relatively complicated, and we’re working on adding more from such sites as HYPERCARD.ORG who have been gathering amazing Stacks for years. If you’re someone who worked on a HyperCard stack in the past, or oversee a collection of Stacks created by others, please feel free to contact hypercard@textfiles.com to receive assistance in adding your stacks, emulated, to the Archive.

We hope this is the start of a large, quality collection of emulated programs at the Archive around the Macintosh, and thank you for spreading the word about it, and the importance of providing instant worldwide access to historical software.

A shout-out to volunteer Stephen Cole who has taken on the mantle of adding new titles to the Macintosh collection over time, including the ingestion of HyperCard stacks. 

Early Macintosh Emulation Comes to the Archive

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After offering in-browser emulation of console games, arcade machines, and a range of other home computers, the Internet Archive can now emulate the early models of the Apple Macintosh, the black-and-white, mouse driven computer that radically shifted the future of home computing in 1984.

While there are certainly predecessors to the computer desktop paradigm, the introduction of the Macintosh brought it to a mass market and in the 30 years since, it has been steadily adapted by every major computing platform and operating system.

The first set of emulated Macintosh software is located in this collection. This is a curated presentation of applications, games, and operating systems from 1984-1989.

If you’ve not experienced the original operating system for the Macintosh family of computers, it’s an interesting combination of well-worn conventions in the modern world, along with choices that might seem strange or off-the-mark. At the time the machine was released, however, they landed new ideas in the hands of a worldwide audience and gained significant fans and followers almost immediately.

The story of the creation of the operating system and the Macintosh itself are covered in many collections at the Archive, including this complete run of Macworld magazine and these deep-dive Macintosh books.

As for the programs currently presented, they are in many cases applications that have survived to the present day in various forms, or are the direct ancestors.

While it is a (warning) 40 megabyte download, this compilation of System 7.0.1 includes a large variety of software programs and a rather rich recreation of the MacOS experience of 1991.

Enjoy this (9-inch, black and white) window into computer history!

Many people worked very hard to bring this emulation system to bear: Hampa Hug created PCE (the original Macintosh emulator program). Experiments and work by James Friend (PCE.js) and Marcio T. (Retroweb) ported PCE to javascript via Emscripten. They all provided continued assistance as the Emularity team approached refining the emulator to work within the Archive’s framework. Much work was done by Daniel Brooks, Phil-el, James Baicoianu, and Vitorio Miliano, with Daniel Brooks putting in multiple weeks of refinement.

The Internet Arcade becomes an Archive Reality

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A couple years back, we introduced the Internet Arcade, which enabled people around the world to play a number of Arcade titles from the last 40 years in their browsers, instantly. We’ve also had collections of console games, and a general library of tens of thousands of software programs which has also proven very popular.

The work continues to expand the emulated systems and refresh what titles are available, but a project we’ve had going on the side for a while just came to fruition.

Among the organizations that turned out to benefit from having our browser-based emulations was X-Arcade, manufacturers of high-quality joysticks and control panels for use with computers and software. Meant to have the original Arcade feel, a few examples of these controllers were gifted to the Archive and we’ve used them pretty extensively in demonstration days and special events.

Last year, X-Arcade announced an old-school full-sized arcade machine case for sale, and generously offered to send one to the Archive as well. We contacted an excellent artist, Mar Williams of Sudux.com, who has done excellent art for the DEFCON hacking conference and many other events, and she put together custom Internet Archive-themed arcade side art for the machine. Here’s what she came up with:

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The machine has made its way through shipping and moving companies and arrived at the Internet Archive’s 300 Funston Avenue headquarters in great shape, along with all the electronics and parts to make it go soon.

It’s one thing to see a mockup, and another to see the actual machine in your lobby:

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Over the next few weeks, the system will be set up to run with the Internet Archive systems and provide a really nice demonstration station for the many guests and visitors we see. It really jazzes up the place!

In the meantime, we’re now providing you with links to download the artwork files, in case you want to use them yourself.

Thanks again to X-Arcade for the lovely addition to our lobby, and to Mar Williams for such fantastic art!

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I CAN HAZ MEME HISTORY??

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Jason Scott presents Internet Memes of the last 20 Years at the Internet Archive’s 20th anniversary celebration.

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It’s always going to be an open question as to what parts of culture will survive beyond each generation, but there’s very little doubt that one of them is going to be memes.

Memes are, after all, their own successful transmission of entertainment. A photo, an image that you might have seen before, comes to you with a new context. A turn of phrase, used by a politician or celebrity and in some way ridiculous or unique, comes back you in all sorts of new ways (Imma let you finish…) and ultimately gets put back into your emails, instant messages, or even back into mass media itself.

However, there are some pretty obvious questions as to what memes even are or what qualifies as a meme. Everyone has an opinion (and a meme) to back up their position.leo2

One can say that image macros, those combinations of an expressive image with big bold text, are memes; but it’s best to think of them as one (very prominent) kind of a whole spectrum of Meme.

Image Macros rule the roost because they’re platform independent. They slip into our lives from e-mails, texts, websites and even posted on walls and doors. The chosen image (in this example, from the Baz Luhrman directed Great Gatsby) portrays an independent idea (Here’s to you) and the text compliments or contrasts it. The smallest, atomic level of an idea. And it gets into your mind, like a piece of candy (or a piece of grit).

photofunia-1475750857It can get way more complicated, however. This 1980s “Internet Archive” logo was automatically generated by an online script which does the hard work of layout, fonts and blending for you. When news of this tool broke in September of 2016 (it had been around a long time before that), this exact template showed up everywhere, from nightclub flyers to endless tweets. Within a short time, the ideas of both “using a computer to do art” and “the 1980s” became part of the payload of this image, as well as the inevitable feeling it was even more cliche and tired as hundreds piled on to using it. The long-term prospects of this “1980s art” meme are unknown.

223798 And let’s not forget that “memes” (a term coined by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene) themselves go back decades before the internet made its first carefully engineered cross-continental connections. Office photocopies ran rampant with passed along motivational (or de-motivational) posters, telling you that you didn’t need to be crazy to work here… but it helps! Suffering the pains of analog transfer, the endless remixing and hand touchups of these posters gave them a weathered look, as if aged by their very (relative) longevity. To many others, this whole grandparent of the internet meme had a more familiar name: Folklore.

Memes are therefore rich in history and a fundamental part of the online experience, passed along by the thousands every single day as a part of communicating with each other. They deserve study, and they’ve gotten it.

Websites have been created to describe both the contributing factors and the available examples of memes throughout the years. The most prominent has been Know Your Meme, which through several rounds of ownership and contributors has consistently provided access to the surprisingly deep dive of research a supposedly shallow “meme” has behind it.

meme-gapBut the very fluidity and flexibility of memes can be a huge weakness — a single webpage or a single version of an image will be the main reference point for knowing why a meme came to be, and the lifespan of these references are short indeed. Even when hosted at prominent hosting sites or as part of a larger established site, one good housecleaning or consolidation will shut off access to the information, possibly forever.

This is where the Internet Archive comes in. With our hundreds of billions of saved URLs from 20 years stored in the Wayback Machine, a neutral storehouse of not just the inspirations for memes but examples of the memes themselves are kept safe for retrieval beyond the fleeting fads and whims of the present.
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The metaphor of “the web” turns out to be more and more apt as time goes on — like spider webs, they’re both surprisingly strong, but also can be unexpectedly lost in an instant. Connections that seemed immutable and everlasting will drop off the face of the earth at the drop of a hat (or a server, or an unpaid hosting bill).

Memes are, as I said, compressed culture. And when you lose culture, you lose context and meaning to the words and thoughts that came before. The Wayback machine will be a part of ensuring they stick around for a long time to come.