Matt, great talk today -- I'm fascinated by your project, and I had a couple of questions that I didn't have time to ask at the end of the session. Where did you come across the Mystery House disk/disk image in the first place? What other images have you scrutinized?

I wonder how difficult it is to grab a "cassette image" from what was my first data storage system: the TRS-80 Color Computer, which wrote onto and read from cassette tapes. I used to write and rewrite over the tapes with the silly little basic programs I wrote, and I wonder what kind of forensic traces I left behind all those years ago.

And one last question: is anyone making any kind of systemmatic effort to preserve disk images of old programs rather than simply archiving the source code itself?

Hi Mark,

Thanks very much for the kind words. I'm not sure how you would go about obtaining an image from your TRS-80 tapes. The basic procedure for creating a disk image involves using a serial line or a modem to move the data on the disk from the original Apple computer to a PC, with the aid of an appropriate software utility. A good emulator will allow you to create a new disk image by putting a “blank” disk into its virtual drive and formatting it with DOS 3.3 or ProDOS, just as it would have been formatted using the original hardware. So bottom line is you need both the software utility and the hardware to effect the transfer.

I got the disk image from an anonymous FTP server that warehouses such things. Disk images themselves are created primarily to serve the emulator community, not new media theorists ;-) But there are many hundreds out there.

Nick Montfort first turned me on to this, over burritos in College Park.

Hope to see you at the ELO happy hour later today.