The older generation and their technologies are dying off. History is being lost, one senior and one computer at a time. Keeping Emulation Environments Portable (KEEP) is a project aimed at creating software that can recognise, recover, play, and safeguard all types of computer files from the 1970s forward. Articles written in Electric Pencil that ran on the Altair 8800 could be irretrievable.

 

At the pace technology changes, current hardware and software will be obsolete soon, too. Remember Betamax and VHS? How about 5-inch floppy disks, eight track tapes? Phones that pulled into the wall? Yes, obsolescence comes built in nowadays.

Other emulators already exist which are specific to certain platforms or types of media, but the new version will be able to emulate media in any format. To ensure that the emulator itself doesn’t become obsolete, there are plans to update it regularly as new formats become popular, but are destined to slip soon from memory.

Libraries and national archives are struggling with losing access to what they are trying to keep for posterity. Britain's National Archive estimates that it holds enough information to fill about 580,000 encyclopedias in formats that are no longer widely available.

As the National Library of the Netherlands, the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (KB) is responsible for the Dutch deposit library. More than three years ago, the KB, in co-operation with IBM, developed a large-scale storage system called e-Depot to meet the specific requirements of long-term preservation. The majority of electronic publications in the e-Depot are deposited and stored in PDF format. Other formats are also accepted for storage in the e-Depot, such as Microsoft Office documents, TIFF images, and HTML documents.

In 2005, digital preservation department employees, Jeffrey van der Hoeven, project manager, with Hilde van Wijngaarden, department head, published a paper titled “Modular emulation as a long-term preservation strategy for digital objects.” Therein, they recognized that the industry was skeptical regarding emulation as a preservation strategy. Although it might have been the only game in town, they stated that emulation was considered too technically challenging, too expensive, and time-consuming. Therefore, emulation was prevented from being developed for preservation purposes.

The paper explained that “Permanent access strategies can roughly be divided into two groups: migration and emulation. Migration is aimed at the digital object itself, and aims to change the object in such a way that software and hardware developments will not affect its availability. By changing or updating the format of an object, it is possible to render these objects on current systems.

“Emulation does not focus on the digital object, but on the hard- and software environment in which the object is rendered. It aims at (re)creating an environment in which the digital object can be rendered in its authentic form. Emulation is the process of bringing digital objects back to life in their original environment on top of a different computer environment.”

Even at that time, the KB and the National Archives of the Netherlands thought that emulation-based preservation could be worth-while and encouraged further development and testing. In 2006, they started their own emulation project with plans for a modular emulator, hoping to present a working prototype in early 2007.

The KEEP project goes beyond a modular emulator in that it is being called “universal” and “the world’s first general purpose” emulator. It carries a price tag of $5.2 million, contributed by the European Union.

Computer historians Dr David Anderson and Dr Janet Delve, and computer games expert Dan Pinchbeck at the University of Portsmouth in the UK are partners in the European KEEP project.

 

Dr. Anderson said, “Early hardware like games consoles and computers are already found in museums but if you can’t show visitors what they did, by playing the software on them, it would be much the same as putting musical instruments on display but throwing away all the music. For future generations it would be a cultural catastrophe.”

Dr Anderson agrees that emulation was more workable in the long term than the usual method of preserving old files which involves migrating information on to new formats. The argument against migration is that every migration runs the risk of corruption and degradation. In contrast, emulation recreates the platform used to run the media, so migration risks are reduced.

Fears that computer and video games will never be able to be played again can be laid to rest also. The software emulator is not just aimed at text or spreadsheets.

The European Game Developers Federation, as well as the national libraries of France, the Netherlands and Germany, are involved in the KEEP project. We’ll be looking for similar projects worldwide. X

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