Photography ... astronomy ... art ... design ... technology
(... and the odd rant)

All of these make my world go 'round, to some extent, and they will all be found here at some time or other. Some of the photography can be purchased from my Redbubble site. I can also be found at Tempus Fugit (no longer being updated).

Thursday, July 17, 2008

The past is evaporating

I have always been concerned about the disappearance of ephemeral (and not-so-ephemeral) things, that deserve a greater degree of longevity. In my domestic surroundings, this manifests as a love of old or antique furniture, cameras, books, and so on. Photographs have a special place in my heart, as documents of people and events in the past - especially when those photographs are from the early years of photographic endeavour.

Retro Thing reports on the potential loss of early expmples of computer software, in "Restoring Woz's Original Apple BASIC":


"You might not realize how much early microcomputer software has been lost over the years. Steve Wozniak's Apple BASIC is a case in point. Only a few original copies of the tape still exist, and there were no perfect binary dumps of the 4096 byte file until Michael Steil recently decided to try his hand at reading a 2002 mp3 audio recording [mp3] of the original 30 second cassette file."

This is especially horrifying when the potential loss relates to such a pivotal piece of computing history. Read on, here.

clipped from www.retrothing.com
Apple I

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