Date   : Thu, 31 Jul 2003 17:19:20 +0100 (BST)
From   : Jules Richardson <julesrichardsonuk@...>
Subject: Re: Doc Project

> Cannot commit anything at the moment, but the University of Leeds is
> currently bidding for the UK Digital Curation Centre (funded by JISC for
> FE/HE) and part of the role of the centre is to preserve software
> documentation. We might well be intersted collaborative work.

The problem (IMHO) is that everything's too fragmented at present, at least in
terms of preservation of the various models. Plenty of people collect machines,
but they're spread all over the place. Less people collect documentation or
software for those machines. Fewer still preserve ROM images (although efforts
seem to be better in the Acorn world that for other manufacturers)

There doesn't seem to be an effort to try to collect everything together in one
place for a particular model or manufactuer, say. The doc project goes a long
way for BBC machines in terms of the documentation, but doesn't store ROM
images - and as the site maintainer has mentioned, space is currently a
problem.

What's the design life of an EPROM? 15 years or so? There are probably ones out
there that have already failed and been lost. Working machines might be
abundant now, but they won't be in another 20 years or so - and if one day the
only way to show how these machines operated is through the use of emulators
then it's important to preserve the software and ROM code now.

I'm hoping to make a stab at collecting data together for Acorn 8-bit machines
(System 1 - Master) at the very least; I think I can swing a few GB of online
storage to hold things, with documentation obviously taking up the most space.
Plenty more room available off-line if needs be. 

As scanning documentation is a huge task, I'm wondering if an online list of
'who has what' could also be useful - intended for collectors out there who
have essentially static collections. Whilst they might not be willing to scan
documentation in they may be willing to allow themselves to be contactable in
the event that somebody needs something obscure looking up, and that sort of
service could still prove invaluable for keeping some of the more obscure
hardware running. I've certainly found it frustrating for some of my rarer
machines to know that there's probably *someone* else out there who may own
one, but finding them can prove impossible.

cheers

Jules


====
Backward conditioning: putting saliva in a dog's mouth in an attempt to make
a bell ring.

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