Historic preservation is one of the most evident benefits of vintage computing. On one hand, software and digital content are among the easiest cultural artifacts to preserve because they can be copied and backed up easily. But the ability to actually run that software can be a challenge as platforms are discontinued.
Thanks to open source, no technology ever has to become obsolete, so long as a community remains to support it. You can sync Newtons and Palm Pilots with modern desktops, download web browsers for long-discontinued operating systems, or connect vintage computers like the Apple IIe to the modern internet via WiFi. Every year, new cartridges are released for old-school video game consoles like the Nintendo Entertainment System and Game Boy.
Emulators have long provided a way to run old software—written for discontinued hardware and operating systems that might be difficult or impossible to find today—on newer platforms. You can play retro games with MAME or RetroArch, manage your contacts with the cult-favorite Lotus Agenda personal information manager in DOSBox, or run old Palm applications in your browser. The open source communities behind these projects endeavor to mimic the necessary hardware and software layers as accurately as possible.
Fun and learning are commonly cited reasons for working on these sorts of projects. “I think the biggest reason a lot of us are into retro-computing is that it harkens to an age when you could understand everything the computer was doing,” says Cameron Kaiser, a vintage computing enthusiast who maintains Floodgap, a server and website that hosts one of the most well-known modern Gopher servers, as well as the PowerPC web browser TenFourFox and many other projects.
Read much more in a wonderful ReadME Project post here.
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