Wow, that’s cool. It’s a shame that so much software will never see the light
of day. Many billions of dollars were spent developing software in the 80s for
the DOD as well as Soviet agencies. I’ve heard it argued that the USSR lost the
cold war mainly because the USA made them spend so much on defense, and quite a
sizable chunk of that was for software.
Gary
Interesting collection, as well as the web-portal emulator for the
languages ...
One obvious interest is "simple" nostalgia... many, though not all, of
us are old enough to have "been there" for the systems, the tools (or
games mostly in this link's case), and the hope for a better tomorrow
that seemed to come along for the ride in early computer/software work.
These two links make me think once more of the duality between "art" and
"artifact"... between the culture and experience of making and using
these artifacts (from computer games to spread sheets to ICBM targeting
and guidance systems) and the artifacts (body of code, running
code/system) themselves. One point of things like the Internet Archive
and the Language Emulator Portal would seem to be to not only preserve
these artifacts but to make them accessible to a wide range of people
(on the off chance that they will somehow be re-used in some way)?
Art/Artifact seems related to the duals of Form/Function and
Structure/Dynamics ... and in the context of a rapidly evolving
(changing/morphing?) environment (most of the artifacts in Glen's
examples are order 30 years old, or about the lifetime or career span of
most people alive today).
This reminds me of the famous Cambrian Radiation of half a billion years
ago in the animal/fossil record... in some odd sense, we have a
co-incidence in the computer of a new and very rich venue for the
creation, mutation, and expression of complex structures and of a
fossilization medium. This may in some odd way parallel the belief
that the Cambrian Explosion may have been partly driven by the increased
calcium concentrations in seawater which simultaneously made it easier
for organisms to build skeletal structures (opening a new dimension for
exploration of adjacent possibles?) and for those structures to be
recorded as fossils.
Being down in the pores in the needles on the twigs on the branches of
the trees in the forest, I think it will be hard for us to begin to see
what kind of explosion, we ourselves are within. I'm not on board with
the Singularians (especially of the Kurzweil variety) exactly, but I do
think that something "spectacular" is afoot and am both awed and cowed
by the possibilities (cowed by realizing how incredibly inefficient and
brutal evolution/natural-selection is).
- Steve
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