Historic Software

"Historic Software" is what the Germans call "Unwort". A political term that does not describe anything really existent.

A quote from Ward with respect to his pdp8sim, computer museums and historic software:

"...we are now seeing a proliferation of computer museums, both physical and virtual, every one of them enshrines programs that run or the machines that run them. Not one believes that anyone would want to look at the listings."

This is not true, I do. Look at home.arcor.de . Of course, most people want to read programs for machines they run themselves and I am no exception.

You're not disagreeing with Ward, you're in Violent Agreement with what he said. There are a vast number of individuals who are interested in Historic Software listings, but he said museums don't believe that to be the case. Your link is not to a museum, it's to an individual effort. There are thousands of such on the web. To make Ward's point more carefully: I would say that at least some of the volunteer/paid staff at places like the Computer History Museum [On Line Computer Museum] actually are aware that such individuals exist, but they don't believe that their primary audience - the average museum visitors - have any such interest.

Does anyone have a better idea as how to collect and catalogue Historic Software?

See program listings for several Atari 2600 games here: www.io.com

Borland Developer Network history museum: community.borland.com Contains Turbo Pascal, and others. You can download and run the old software.

(...fond memories, for some of us. ;-) -- Jeff Grigg