Emulation has gotten incredibly sophisticated recently – the Internet Archive has even made it possible to run thousands of vintage MS-DOS and Windows 3.1 programs from an emulator inside your web browser, no additional downloads required, which is really an incredible feat of programming. In order to access software or digital files created for obsolete systems, the primary solutions these days are emulation and virtualization – two slightly different methods of, essentially, using software to trick a contemporary computer into mimicking the behavior and limitations of other hardware and/or operating systems. They could (and might still, if it comes to it) just bring the laptops to the site and run the software in the native environment, but that’s unideal for a couple reasons: first, I’m always somewhat hesitant for department equipment to leave campus and second, having old hardware running these old operating systems natively is something of a luxury, which our students may very well not have in the future as equipment continues to age, or if they work at an institution with shallower pockets for digital preservation. However, the students would only have access to the digital materials on-site at the partner institution for this project, and could not bring the software back to NYU. Normally, this wouldn’t present much of an issue, as MIAP’s “Old Media Lab” still has several old Power Mac G4 desktops and even a couple Macbook laptops running various early versions of Mac OSX. Yes, as it turned out, the students were working with a piece of multimedia artwork/software that required a PowerPC version of Mac OSX (10.0 through 10.5) in order to run. Going back to the lab, I had a hint of what was coming from the whiteboard: Uh oh. A couple weeks ago Mona Jimenez asked me to step into her course on Handling Complex Media, to help a student group with a tech request (business as usual).

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