From sentto-2719433-0-980375831-gtoal=vt.com@returns.onelist.com Wed Jan 24 16:04:35 2001 Received: from fj.egroups.com (fj.egroups.com [64.211.240.231]) by admin.vt.com (8.8.5/8.7.3) with SMTP id QAA10273 for ; Wed, 24 Jan 2001 16:04:28 -0600 (CST) X-eGroups-Return: sentto-2719433-0-980375831-gtoal=vt.com@returns.onelist.com Received: from [10.1.4.53] by fj.egroups.com with NNFMP; 24 Jan 2001 22:37:15 -0000 X-Sender: gtoal@admin.vt.com X-Apparently-To: edinburgh-computer-history@egroups.com Received: (EGP: mail-7_0_1_2); 24 Jan 2001 22:37:10 -0000 Received: (qmail 36730 invoked from network); 24 Jan 2001 22:21:53 -0000 Received: from unknown (10.1.10.26) by l7.egroups.com with QMQP; 24 Jan 2001 22:21:53 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO admin.vt.com) (204.117.188.10) by mta1 with SMTP; 24 Jan 2001 22:21:52 -0000 Received: (from root@localhost) by admin.vt.com (8.8.5/8.7.3) id PAA09843 for edinburgh-computer-history@egroups.com; Wed, 24 Jan 2001 15:48:55 -0600 (CST) Message-Id: <200101242148.PAA09843@admin.vt.com> To: edinburgh-computer-history@egroups.com From: Graham Toal MIME-Version: 1.0 Mailing-List: list edinburgh-computer-history@egroups.com; contact edinburgh-computer-history-owner@egroups.com Delivered-To: mailing list edinburgh-computer-history@egroups.com Precedence: bulk List-Unsubscribe: Date: Wed, 24 Jan 2001 15:48:55 -0600 (CST) Reply-To: edinburgh-computer-history@egroups.com Subject: [ed-comp-hist] Welcome to the Edinburgh Computer History project Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Status: RO In the last year or so, the cost of large hard disks has plummeted - here in the US I can buy an 80Gb drive for $300. We are living in an era where from now on, almost every human endeavor is going to be recorded for posterity. Unfortunately, this wasn't the case in the early days when computers were first invented, up to about the 1980's. Programs which were written in that era tended not to be preserved online as a system went from one hard drive to the next. Much of what was written in the early days was backup up to 'archival' media, and a whole lot of that is lost or no longer readable. I myself had a very harrowing experience just recently when trying to recover software from 600 ten-year-old floppies, and they were in a format that is still in use. I lost about 5% of them. This prompted me to realise that we really have a very narrow window indeed in which we can save our computing heritage. And Edinburgh is truly responsible for some great computing heritage - our mistake at the time was that we did not subscribe to the American style 'publish or perish' ethic, and we did not publicise much of what we did. With the result that anyone in the future wanting to know what the significant history of computing was, will rely on books such as Steven Levy's "Hackers" and will come away thinking that only MIT and a few other US universities were the only pioneers. So... I would like for us to save the pioneering work done at Edinburgh for posterity. Even if it is not truly appreciated right now, I believe it will be one day; but for now simply saving everything we can has to be a top priority. This project will dedicate a web site for every piece of source code from Edinburgh's past that anyone can find. As I said above - disk space is cheap now. I believe we can save everything that was ever written in Edinburg on one disk here. Also I am personally willing to burn CDs of the archive for any Edinburgh people who want to save a peronal copy, more or less as a distributed backup mechanism! So... get out there, approach your lecturers, friends - anyone who remembers all the good work (and even the bad!) that was done at EUCS and ERCC, and help start this project off by identifying our lost history; then (and in parallel to as much extent as possible) we'll start collecting those sources and hosting them on our archive site. The site is currently housed at http://www.gtoal.com/history/ - just to get it going. I will move it to a better machine, and probably it's own domain, once we get started. Thank you to everyone who participates in this project. I will be handling as much on-line coordination as I can - feel free to email me privately if you want, but I'd prefer that all communication was via this mailing list so we can be 100% 'open skies' as the Americans say. I have opened up the mailing list archives to non-members so you can point your colleagues at it to check out what we're doing and see if they want to join us. Gordon Brebner will be coordinating people on the ground in Edinburgh, for instance if someone needs access to old tapes or disks stored in the Computer Science department. Let's do it! Graham Toal To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: edinburgh-computer-history-unsubscribe@egroups.com