[ot] [!nt] \n2+0\
integer at www.god-emil.dk
integer at www.god-emil.dk
Tue Nov 28 01:15:45 CET 2000
> From the Middle Ages of the Information Society
> By Tilman Baumgärtel
>
> published @:
> receiver.mannesmann.com
>
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du = outdatd + d!zpozabl. make spasz + JETZT!!!!
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-
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>
> <Tilman Baumgärtel is a freelance author on Net culture
> <and Net art. In this contribution to receiver, he describes
> <why the exciting thing about the Internet - its constant
> <change and further development - is also its biggest
> <impediment. If something is not fixed, it is not present
> <either. Contents generated on the Net are everywhere and
> <nowhere, and at some point they disappear from their
> <non-location into nothingness. Let Tilman Baumgärtel
> <introduce you to the "Dead Browsers Society".
>
>
>
>
>
> The Roman commander Scipio Aemilianus is said to have
> wept when he gave the order to destroy Carthage. His
> troops set off, burnt down the city, razed the buildings that
> were still standing, ploughed up the land and scattered salt
> in the furrows so that nothing could be grown there
> anymore. And yet however thorough the Roman
> legionaries were in their devastation, today tourists in
> Tunisia can stroll through excavated and partially restored
> buildings, marvel at the small stone children's coffins at the
> roadside and the mosaics in the Bardo Museum, or
> wander through the ruins of the huge thermal baths of
> Antonius. Although only fragments remain of Carthage,
> the city that was more or less completely ravaged over
> 2000 years ago, the ruins we see today give us an idea of
> the big, splendid and wealthy city that once stood there.
>
> Perhaps historians that decide to research the history of
> the computer and the Internet one day will weep even
> more bitterly than the Roman commander Scipio
> Aemilianus. After all, in the not-so-distant future the digital
> worlds that have emerged in the last few decades on the
> hard drives of computers and later on the Net will leave
> behind considerably fewer remains than the ruins of
> Carthage currently being excavated by archaeologists
> under the auspices of UNESCO - or, in the worst-case
> scenario, none at all. There is good reason to doubt
> whether in 2000 years there will be any remnants at all of
> the technology that will probably have such revolutionary
> consequences as Gutenberg's printing press or James
> Watt's steam engine in the past. Although computer
> technology is changing at break-neck speed and seems to
> re-invent itself with every passing year, so far few people
> have thought about what will happen to computers and
> their digital products when they are no longer used on a
> day-to-day basis. The march of time is not kind to the
> machines that have triggered what is undoubtedly the
> greatest scientific and social revolution of the second half
> of the twentieth century. While literature and art grow
> more important and significant with time, old computers
> become obsolete technology after a few years; all they do
> is get in the way and take up space.
>
> Of course, not all old computers are lost and forgotten.
> Some of them are on display at the Heinz Nixdorf
> Museum in Paderborn (http://www.hnf.de/index.html),
> for example, or at the Berlin Museum of Technology
> (http://www.dtmb.de/Rundgang/p09.html),
> which has even built a replica of
> the very first German computer - the mechanical Z1,
> which Konrad Zuse designed in the forties at his parents'
> apartment in the Kreuzberg area of Berlin. The software
> that was operated on these main-frame computers,
> however, poses more of a problem: it was stored on
> punch cards which often got lost, and programs that were
> stored on other data carriers often cannot be
> reconstructed today because there are no corresponding
> scanners or because the magnetic tapes, diskettes or CD
> ROMs have simply destroyed themselves. "Bitrot" is the
> term used to describe this insidious decay of digital data
> and their carriers - or even the data carriers themselves:
> experts predict that most computer hard drives will no
> longer be of any use within a few decades. Even CD
> ROMs, often thought of as safe, only have a life span of
> around 30 years. Diskettes and audio cassettes, which
> were used to store a lot of programs for the VC 64
> Volkscomputer, are reliable for no more than five to ten
> years - provided, that is, that they are not demagnetised
> earlier through an unfortunate coincidence or because they
> were placed on top of the television. This is why backup copies of texts
> or images on the hard drive are a substitute activity rather than a
> permanent storage of the digital relics of one's own life.
>
> State-funded museums or institutes like the German
> National Archives, whose job it is to preserve historically
> significant documents, have so far exercised an elegant
> restraint in this respect. Although the Federal Archive in
> Karlsruhe accumulates piles of files from authorities and
> law courts or the films of Leni Riefenstahl, you will not find
> old computer games there, or even popular programs like
> Windows 3.1, and yet millions of people have used them
> or played with them. The manufacturers of this software
> are now so preoccupied with earning money that they
> have no time to take care of the long-term archiving of
> their products. You may think that it will not harm future
> generations if they do not know how people used to play
> "Moorhuhnjagd", that hugely popular virtual grouse hunt.
> But it is precisely this type of game that, for a brief period
> in time, was much more important to a lot of people than
> the current affairs recorded in newspapers, books and
> archives and handed down from one generation to the
> next. When it comes to classifying the importance of such
> mass phenomena, we would rather leave it up to the
> selective mechanisms of historical writing rather than the
> arbitrariness of sheer negligence.
> If anyone comes to the rescue, it will not be public
> institutions, but freaks and hackers that have found in the
> Internet an ideal forum for their common obsessions.
> Websites like 8bit Museum (http://www.8bit-museum.de/)
> or 8bit Nirvana (http://www.zock.de) contain virtual
> collections of historical home computers, which would be
> the envy of any museum of technology in terms of their
> completeness and presentation. Popular computers in
> particular, such as Atari (http://atari-computer.de/abbuc)
> or Apple (http://www.apple-history.com), have inspired fan sites
> that would satisfy the most ardent of admirers. There are
> also some odd things such as a website of a book on the
> T-shirts of Apple (http://www.appletshirts.com/).
> Yes, you read that correctly - the
> collected T-shirts on the subject of Apple computers (and
> there are more than 1,000 of them). Even the computers
> of the now defunct GDR have their very own opulent
> website based on a Master's thesis of the Humboldt
> University of Berlin (http://robotron.informatik.hu-berlin.de).
>
> It is not only on the Net, but also in the physical universe
> that do-it-yourselfers and computer nerds have set up
> their own computer museums. The University of
> Hildesheim hosts - but does not fund - the Computer
> Culture Museum (http://www.uni-hildesheim.de/~cmuseum/index.html),
> which has amassed an impressive array
> of hardware. Then there is the Computer Cabinet of
> Göttingen (http://home.t-online.de/home/jkirchh/homepage.htm),
> which has built up a small collection of what
> some people would think of as electronic scrap. While
> these museums tend to be private collections, the
> Computer Games Museum of Berlin (www.computerspielemuseum.de)
> really is open to visitors; all the computers and games computers on
> display there can actually be used. This museum,
> however, is funded not by the Berlin Senate (thus
> condemning one of the potentially most popular exhibition
> venues of the city to a back-room existence) but by the
> non-profit-making Association for the Promotion of Youth
> and Social Work.
>
> Although these museums have worked wonders in terms
> of preserving hardware and keeping some of it
> operational, our only hope of preserving games and other
> software in the long term is emulation, the re-programming
> of old programs for new computers while remaining true
> to the original. The Java programming language, which is
> not restricted to computers of a certain type, plays a
> particularly important role in this. Programmer Claus Giloi
> used it back in 1996 to write simulations of the first two
> programs for Personal Computer: Altair and IMSAI. Both
> programs are still circulating on the Net today. For games
> in particular, there is currently a confusing mass of
> websites which - like Emulationworld (http://www.emulationworld.de),
> for example - collect and distribute emulations. Another trend among
> fans of so-called "retrocomputing" is "abandonware",
> which can also be found in abundance on the Internet at
> sites such as "Abandongames" (http://www.abandongames.com) or "Extreme
> Abandonware"http://www.fortunecity.com/underworld/cartridge/1118.
> These are computer games which are no
> longer sold by their manufacturers (in other words, they
> have been discontinued or abandoned) but still operate on
> commercially available computers. They include the many
> games developed for the DOS operating system as well
> as those designed for Atari or Amiga computers. And
> these are the best ones anyway, according to a lot of
> "gamers".
>
> Incidentally, the manufacturers of these games do not see this
> as the preservation of digital culture, but use a considerably
> less favourable term to describe it: piracy. Whether or not the
> distribution of old, forgotten games on the Internet contravenes
> the law has yet to be definitively clarified. The fans of abandonware,
> which in addition to games also includes old versions of programs like
> the McAffee Anti-Virus-Scan or the Norton Disk Doctor, argue
> that it is simply a way of providing people with software
> that would otherwise be unavailable.
>
> US software archivists in the abandonware scene also
> point out that a lot of games used to come with a
> guarantee of a free replacement when the games diskettes
> no longer worked. If you ask a software production outfit
> for a replacement today, you rarely find anyone who can
> even remember the game in question.
>
> Yet although these games are still available on the
> WorldWideWeb, the medium that promises to be a
> storehouse of the complete knowledge of mankind is in
> danger of losing its own entire history - it is already
> virtually impossible to archive the Internet on account of
> the proportions it has assumed. In the future, aspiring
> publishers of correspondence between artists or authors
> will find themselves looking into a gaping black hole: the
> e-mails written by the luminaries of our time will be the
> victim of some operating system upgrade or will simply be
> deleted from the hard drive to make room for new data.
> And the information available today in the form of HTML
> documents on the WorldWideWeb can easily be
> withdrawn from the server tomorrow without leaving a
> trace.
>
> The grey pages of the WWW in its early days with their
> black, unformatted text without pictures or animation have
> now all but disappeared - like an endangered species.
> Today, anyone that wants to see one of these grey pages
> from the stone age of the Net has to search long and hard
> - or consult Pär Lannerö's "Dejavu" (http://www.dejavu.org)
> website. The Swedish programmer has developed a browser emulator which
> allows the nostalgic user to surf around in a colourless
> web, just like in 1993. In his "Dead Browsers Society", a
> click of the mouse is all it takes to open up long-forgotten
> software like NSCA Mosaic - the very first web program
> - or Hot Java. The old browsers can also display today's
> pages, except that the highly colourful, flickering pages are
> replaced by static grey expanses. If there were a Net
> Museum, "Dejavu" would be the department of prehistory
> and early history. Lannerö is also to be commended for
> holding on to some of the earliest websites - such as an
> inaugural Yahoo! homepage or the page on which Sun
> Microsystems announced the Java programming language
> - so that astounded future generations can look at them
> through the "spectacles" of an ancient browser. Yes,
> children, this is what it was like in those days.
>
> In its infancy, the Internet was often compared to the
> Library of Alexandria which, in ancient times, is supposed
> to have stored the entire knowledge of the era. The
> analogy is more fitting than was thought just a few years
> ago: the Library of Alexandria is known to have burnt
> down; today the WorldWideWeb is gently smouldering
> away. Virtually no historic homepage from 1994 has
> survived into the year 2000. Major Internet projects, such
> as the Berlin "Kulturbox" or the "International City",
> have vanished from the Net without a data trace. And
> none of the Internet start-up companies soon to go
> bankrupt will hurriedly bequeath its website to the nearest
> national library just before it goes under - and even if it
> did, nobody there would know what to do with it.
>
> Once again, it is a hacker that has come up with the best
> initiative to preserve historic websites and FTP sites: a US
> Internet entrepreneur called Brewster Kahle, who has
> grown rich on the WAIS technology he developed, now
> wants to set up an archive of the Internet (www.archive.org).
> Automated robot programs collect websites and pass them on to his
> Internet Archive, where they are currently being stored on
> tape. Part of the collection can be viewed at the
> Smithsonian National Museum of Washington. But here,
> too, it is questionable whether the stored data will be
> accessible at all in the near future - the hardware and Net
> protocols change that quickly. And anyway, the program
> can only collect HTML data at the moment. Websites
> linked to data banks or dependent on other server
> software are not picked up by the web robots. The
> Internet Archive will not be able to show how the Amazon
> website works or how e-mails are retrieved using
> Hotmail.
>
> And should Kahle run out of money for his
> mammoth project (his servers currently hold 35
> terrabytes of data), we can only hope that a state
> institution will jump into the breach and save his
> virtual collection.
>
> Today, ruins bear witness to the fall of Carthage. But what
> will remain of the digital information society? Just the notes
> written by contemporaries? The information society has
> left it up to the honorary commitment of hackers and
> computer freaks to preserve its memories. But of course
> they could find a girlfriend tomorrow and, because they
> will then have better things to do with their time, they may
> simply delete their websites with archives of old software
> or historic web pages. These will then be gone, and
> no-one may ever see them again. If you measure the value
> of a culture according to how consciously it handles the
> documents of its own development, then today we are
> living in the most barbaric times since the early Middle
> Ages!
>
> We will still be able to stroll through the ruins of Carthage
> when the much-cited "Internet revolution" is well and truly
> over and forgotten. Anyone wanting to find out about its
> history may have to rely on second-hand documents:
> newspaper articles and books that have reported on the
> phenomenon. Ironically, it looks as if the information
> documented in a medium that has already been declared
> dead - words printed on paper - will have a longer life
> span than the immaterial bits and bytes processed by
> digital computers. Thus an important part of our culture
> will disappear, as if an enraged god had dragged it over to
> the dustbin icon of the Big Computer of History ...
>
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