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www.us-tech.com
October, 2016
Digital Forensics Rescues Retro Video Games
Continued from page 8
practiced on, so they could figure out where he might have gone.”
A Dream Assignment It takes a particular personality
to spend one’s life feeding the NSRL. You would need the passion of a col- lector, the sensibility of a curator, the technical skill of a computer scien- tist, and the ability to find satisfac- tion in a job that you know will nev- er be finished. In other words, you’d have to be a bit like Stephen Cabrinety. And in fact, White does share a number of traits with the man whose collection he has helped to preserve. “We’re just one year apart in age. We both grew up in East Coast suburbs. And I’m also a bit of a collector,” White says, gestur- ing sheepishly at the towering piles in his office. When NIST and Stanford Uni-
versity teamed up on the project, it was a dream assignment for White. He remembers the day in 2012 when the first box from Stanford arrived at the NIST campus in Gaithersburg, Maryland. Inside were early versions of Doom and SimCity, still in their shrink-wrapped boxes. “For me, it was like opening King Tut’s tomb,” White says. Those titles were printed on
5.25 in. floppy discs, and extracting the data was relatively straightfor- ward. Other titles presented greater challenges, such as those that were
published on audio cassette tape. To load up those programs, you play the sound into a computer. “It sounds like a modem squeal,
with all the hiss and static,” White says. Different manufacturers format- ted the sound differently, and White had to find documentation for each. “Sinclair computers stored it one way. Commodore stored it another.”
A Visionary’s Legacy So, can you log in to the Stan-
ford University Library server and play the earliest version of Activi- sion’s Pitfall! in your browser? Not yet, says Lowood. “Our first priority was to make sure that the data sur- vived.” Now that it has, the Stanford team hopes to begin working on sys- tems that will load the games and applications. In the meantime, the collection is available for viewing at the Stanford University Library. For all the work done by experts
at NIST and Stanford, the most im- portant partner in this project was the one who came first. Cabrinety was more than a collector. His dream was to create an educational and re- search archive for future generations to study. In 1989, when he was all of 23 years old, he founded CHIPS — the Computer History Institute for the Preservation of Software, ar- guably the first nonprofit institution of its kind. Cabrinety died too young, but with his collection now saved for posterity, his dream lives on. r
Plato Launches New Website and Catalog
Kennesaw, GA — Plato® has launched a new website that allows customers to locate products and specifications quickly and easily. Product categories include soldering tips, robotic soldering tips, soldering tools, soldering accessories, and cus-
tom development. The custom devel- opment section allows users to create specialized soldering tips, which can be delivered in quantities as low as 100 and as fast as six weeks. The company has also intro-
duced a full-line product catalog available in both English and Span- ish. The catalog includes 1:1 scale
Plato’s updated website.
drawings of all available soldering tips for each tip selection. Products can be purchased directly from the company’s website or by local distri- bution. Plato is a division of Illinois Tool Works (ITW) and its soldering tips and tools are compatible with common soldering stations from Hakko, Weller, Pace, and others. Contact: Plato, 8125 Cobb Cen-
ter Drive, Kennesaw, GA 30152 % 678-819-1408 fax: 806-372-8750 E-mail:
info@platoproducts.com Web:
www.platoproducts.com
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