Command & Conquer, Abandonware, and Data Archaeologists

Command & Conquer, Abandonware, and Data Archaeologistsblognation UK
So I guess it's brownie points today to Electronic Arts - to celebrate the 12th birthday of Command and Conquer, they've posted a link to the ISO of the original C&C game. While it may have been relatively easy to find this title in the dark corners of the internet, for any major label to [...]

Author: Ewan Spence

So I guess it's brownie points today to Electronic Arts - to celebrate the 12th birthday of Command and Conquer, they've posted a link to the ISO of the original C&C game. While it may have been relatively easy to find this title in the dark corners of the internet, for any major label to release a game, even a historical and out of date version, is notable.

But it has me coming back to a related issue, and that is the huge amount of information, applications and programs that are being lost to time. Programs and applications even ten or fifteen years old are not only going to be incredibly difficult to track down, but to find current equipment that you will still be able to run them on will be an even bigger challenge.

In my case, I spent a weekend over the summer doing nothing more than going though two crates a number of floppy disks from my old Sony Mavica camera, transferring the grainy 640×480 snaps to my hard drive, and into my personal back-up system. I suspect that in many years to come that will move and upgrade as technology marches on.

I also loaded my around 350mb of data to a tiny sliver of an SD card, and inserted it into my Nintendo DS. These few square millimetres now hold pretty much every single game ever published for the ZX Spectrum - through a continued mammoth hunt by fans of the legacy 8-bit systems there are only a handful of audio cassette based titles missing from the system.

There is a huge amount of data out there, and we have no idea what historians would make of it, looking back at the birth of the internet around the world. Yet we're doing our best to prevent that happening.

As the world continues to drive forwards, developing new ideas and driving information into a cloud of sites as opposed one central server, are we leaving behind a black hole of nothing? While photo archives have banks of negatives leading up to and after classic shots, all we have is a single Flickr image of the event while the rest are deleted?

Do we have a responsibility to preserve as much of our information as possible for future generations? Or are we risking having 'data archaeologists' in the future announcing to an awed crowd that they've recovered 5% of something called Live Journal and are analysing it now to discover if it can tell them what wiped out seventy five years of data?

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