Announcements
Retrieving the Technological Past
21/08/09 16:31
A sad characteristic of technology is its impermanence. It's not so much the death of the machine that bothers me: it's the entombment of one's work that often accompanies it. For example, of the twelve published educational software titles I have designed and developed, not one can run on the computer on which I type these words. Screen shots (if you were thoughtful enough to take them at the time) are no substitute, either.
That's what I thought until yesterday, anyway. Thanks to cleverer folks than I who have also lost work in the graveyard of old operating systems (or who have lost favorite games too), I now can run my Mac OS 9 software on my Intel Mac OS X 10.5.8 laptop. What pleasure it has been to re-connect with old friends! Bank Street Writer. Geography Search. Graph Action and Graph Action Plus. Chance Encounters. Imagine that books and magazines were suddenly glued shut, or that canvases or sculpture collapsed overnight in scrambled shards. That's what it's been like for me, and that's why I'm so pleased today.
I hope by this means to recover some of the good ideas I had, translating them into my current technological environment. The ideas weren't bad, it was just the medium in which they were expressed. Oh, I do know this problem is mostly unsolvable -- whatever I do tomorrow will no doubt be lost again someday. But for the moment at least some of my work has risen from the dead.
For the software that has made my day, see http://hotfilms.org/non-windows/sheepshaver-mac-os-9-classic-intel-13879.html.
That's what I thought until yesterday, anyway. Thanks to cleverer folks than I who have also lost work in the graveyard of old operating systems (or who have lost favorite games too), I now can run my Mac OS 9 software on my Intel Mac OS X 10.5.8 laptop. What pleasure it has been to re-connect with old friends! Bank Street Writer. Geography Search. Graph Action and Graph Action Plus. Chance Encounters. Imagine that books and magazines were suddenly glued shut, or that canvases or sculpture collapsed overnight in scrambled shards. That's what it's been like for me, and that's why I'm so pleased today.
I hope by this means to recover some of the good ideas I had, translating them into my current technological environment. The ideas weren't bad, it was just the medium in which they were expressed. Oh, I do know this problem is mostly unsolvable -- whatever I do tomorrow will no doubt be lost again someday. But for the moment at least some of my work has risen from the dead.
For the software that has made my day, see http://hotfilms.org/non-windows/sheepshaver-mac-os-9-classic-intel-13879.html.