The problem i've had sometimes though is that whenever I try using some old soft...

pifflesnort · on March 31, 2013

> The problem i've had sometimes though is that whenever I try using some old software (which is mostly games as I was born in the 92), I often get stuck in making the game play nice with the current set up, regardless if I run it in compatibility mode or not. I guess I should set up some VMs with older OSes, just for this purpose.

Emulators are also valuable here; the work done on bsnes is amazing, and MAME does a pretty solid job of emulating hardware (including old Mac hardware) accurately.

There's also still quite a lot of retro hardware and books for sale through used markets; enough that people make it their (if not particularly lucrative) business to collect and resell 'vintage' hardware.

History tends to filter out the bad ideas, such that many of the best ideas survive today. However, human's cultural filters are not perfect, and there are lots of good ideas and intellectual context that can be exceedingly valuable to understanding how things became the way they are, or demonstrating alternative paths (which may even be better than what we have today) that did not emerge for market, financial, or cultural reasons.

I really find historical technology to be edifying in the same way political, musical, and broader cultural history is edifying. I think it's a shame that we don't spend as much time teaching technology/design history to software engineers as we spend training 6th graders to understand their local political/cultural history.

alexsb92 · on March 31, 2013

I'll check those emulators out.

> I really find historical technology to be edifying in the same way political, musical, and broader cultural history is edifying. I think it's a shame that we don't spend as much time teaching technology/design history to software engineers as we spend training 6th graders to understand their local political/cultural history.

I couldn't agree more. My local Science Center is currently running an exhibit on video games of the past 60 years http://www.ontariosciencecentre.ca/GameOn/, and while I was familiar with most of the 90s and onward ones, it was incredibly cool to walk by and see all the different hardware and games pre-Win 95 which was the first computer I ever used. I would love to go through a curated presentation of the history of other types of software, and see them evolve over the years, see what concepts stuck and what concepts were dropped in time. It would be even better if along actual demos, I could read about some of the quirks that they had to deal with and anything else to give a young one like me more context about those times. EDIT: It was even cooler going there with my younger sister, and reliving some of the fun times we had as kids.

Now that I think about it, a physical exhibit where they can recreate the hardware (even if only on a superficial level of aesthetics), and the rooms and settings where that hardware would have existed, and the software it ran would be incredibly interesting. It would essentially be as close as we could get to a time machine for the foreseeable future. That kind of exhibit would probably become one of my favourites very quickly.

pifflesnort · on March 31, 2013

> Now that I think about it, a physical exhibit where they can recreate the hardware (even if only on a superficial level of aesthetics), and the rooms and settings where that hardware would have existed, and the software it ran would be incredibly interesting. It would essentially be as close as we could get to a time machine for the foreseeable future. That kind of exhibit would probably become one of my favourites very quickly.

I agree, that would be fantastic. You see hardware (especially Apple's) show up in fairly prestigious design museums (eg, http://www.moma.org/collection/browse_results.php?object_id=... ), but it's never functioning, much less available to actually use.