You don’t get to play with a whole lot of cool tools or toys when you’re an English professor. Fountain pens and Moleskine notebooks maybe, or a book light or fancy e-reader. Bibliographers—those savants who analyze the unique physical characteristics of manuscripts and printed books—get the best stuff: illuminated magnifying glasses and book weights, white gloves and padded forceps, and more exotic assemblages, such as the original Hinman collator, a contraption the size of a refrigerator whose flashing lights were reportedly capable of inducing epileptic seizure. (Newer collators fold and collapse into a briefcase for transport to distant libraries, and while they may induce headaches, are seizure-free.)
But now that literary materials are often stored and accessible only in electronic formats—manuscript drafts written with word processors, e-mail correspondence buried in hard drives—we may be able to get our hands on some nifty techno-biblio accessories that make data retrieval easier.
One such device is the inelegantly named FC5025 floppy controller card, 1 1/4-by- 3 3/4 inches and silicon-wafer thin. If you grew up in the 1980s when I did, and if your first computer was an Apple, Commodore, Atari, or TRS “Trash” 80, the FC5025 (or one of several gizmos like it) is the link to whatever frail trellises of data may still remain magnetically etched on the surface of the antique “floppies” that went with those machines. One end of the device anchors an old-school gray ribbon cable that connects to an actual 5 1/4-inch drive, scrounged from eBay or a friend (I got mine from a supply closet). The other end holds the familiar, comforting shape of a USB terminus. Sandwiched in between, embedded in the FC5025 controller board, is the software necessary to bridge the gap between a wheezing, groaning disk drive and any modern operating system.
The FC5025 allows me to move data off my old floppy disks in the form of a so-called image file, a virtual simulacrum of the original diskette. With the disk image, I can extract individual files or run it through an “emulator” (more on this later), where I can examine individual bytes and verify that not a single one has been altered in the transition.
Digital preservation is the sort of problem we like to assume others are thinking about. Surely someone, somewhere, is on the job. And, in lots of ways, that is true. Dire warnings of an approaching “digital dark ages” appear periodically in the media: Comparisons are often made to the early years of cinema—roughly half of the films made before 1950 have been lost because of neglect.
But the fact is that enormous resources—government, industry, and academic—are being marshaled to attack the problem. In the United States, for example, the Library of Congress has been proactive through its National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program. Archivists of all stripes now routinely receive training in not only appraisal and conservation of digital materials but also metadata (documentation and description) and even digital forensics, through which we can stabilize and authenticate electronic records. (I now help teach such a course at the University of Virginia’s renowned Rare Book School.) Because of the skills of digital archivists, you can read former presidents’ e-mail messages and examine at Emory University Libraries a virtual recreation of Salman Rushdie’s first computer. Jason Scott’s Archive Team, meanwhile, working without institutional support, leaps into action to download and redistribute imperiled Web content.
But despite those heroic efforts, most individuals must still be their own digital caretakers. You and I must take responsibility for our own personal digital legacy. There are no drive-through windows (like the old photo kiosks) where you can drop off your old floppies and pick up fresh files a day or two later. What commercial services are available tend to assume data are being recovered from more recent technology (like hard drives), and these also can be prohibitively expensive for average consumers. (Organizations like the Library of Congress occasionally sponsor public-information sessions and workshops to teach people how to retrieve data from old machines, but those are obviously catch as catch can.)
Research shows that many of us just put our old disks, CD’s, and whatnot into shoeboxes and hope that if we need them again, we’ll figure out how to retrieve the data they contain when the time comes. (In fact, researchers such as Cathy Marshall, at Microsoft Research, have found that some people are not averse to data loss—that the mishaps of digital life provide arbitrary and not entirely unwelcome opportunities for starting over with clean slates.)
Sometimes, though, you really do want those bits back. That’s where the FC5025, and a little know-how, comes in.
Paul Zelevansky found me through a mutual contact. I’d like to imagine the scene beginning with his shadow against my frosted glass door because this is as close to being a private eye as most English professors will get, but in truth we just exchanged e-mails.
Paul is an educator and artist who works in a variety of media. In the 1980s, he published a highly regarded trilogy of artist’s books—limited-edition books designed to make meaning through their page layouts, images, and typography as well as their language—called The Case for the Burial of Ancestors. One of these, Genealogy, also included a 5 1/4;-inch floppy disk. The disk contained what was ostensibly a video game, descended from ancient times (in keeping with the mythos of the project), called Swallows. It was formatted for the old pre-Macintosh Apple II line of computers, and programmed in something called Forth-79. For many years, Paul had maintained a vintage Apple computer that he would occasionally boot up to revisit Swallows, but when that machine gave up the ghost he was left with only the disks, their black plastic envelopes containing a thin circular film of magnetic media that offered no way to decipher or transcribe their contents. The bits, captured on disks you could hold in your hand, may as well have been on the moon.
So Paul came to see me, and we spent an afternoon in my office at the University of Maryland using my old computing gear and the FC5025 to bring Swallows back to life. The actual process was trivial: It succeeded on the first try, yielding a 140-kilobyte “image” file, the same virtual dimensions as the original diskette. We then installed an Apple II emulator on Paul’s Mac laptop and booted it with the disk image. (An emulator is a computer program that behaves like an obsolescent computer system. Gaming enthusiasts cherish them because they can play all the old classics from the arcades and consoles, like the Atari 2600.) The emulator emitted the strident beep that a real Apple would have made when starting up. It even mimicked the sounds of the spinning drive, a seemingly superfluous effect, except that it actually provides crucial aural feedback—a user could tell from listening to the drive whether the computer was working or just hung up in an endless loop. After a few moments, Swallows appeared.
There’s something uncanny about an emulator. It’s hard to convey to people who have never used one just how authentic the experience is. It’s not perfect—there are all kinds of intangible aspects that an emulator can’t recreate. But it’s important to understand that the emulation program is actually executing the logic of now-vanished hardware, just as though your software were really running on the original system. Which, in a very real sense, it is. As Paul wrote to me in an e-mail message afterward: “I thought that the recovery process would be defined by ‘translation'—one language into another—and so did not expect the notion of ‘simulation.’ ... Like an Apple IIE Potemkin Village standing in front of a Macintosh landscape.”
So there was the green monochrome Apple II screen, its own isolated window amid the flotsam and jetsam of a 21st-century desktop display. Swallows is divided into seven “chapters,” each of which consists of animated, interactive sequences using the jagged bitmapped graphics and computer typography characteristic of the 80s. The overall effect is abstract but still representational, not unlike the art of the American Southwest. Swallows isn’t really a game, but rather one of the earliest exemplars of what we now call electronic literature: complex multimodal storytelling that would not translate to the printed page. In fact, Swallows predates by about a year the initial release of Michael Joyce’s Afternoon, the work often identified as the first major instance of electronic literature.
In February, Paul released Swallows 2.0, which he describes as a “reworking” of the original, with new sound effects and video clips mixed in to the original piece (greatblankness.com).
As satisfying as it was retrieving Swallows, meet-ups arranged through e-mail to recover isolated individual works are not a broadly reproducible solution to the challenges of digital preservation. Those challenges also demand national infrastructures and international partnerships; they require long-range thinking, the rigor of the systems analyst combined with the instinct of the trained archivist. But those systems and solutions aren’t in place yet, so in the meantime, the digital landscape is littered with the fossilized remnants of works that might slip through whatever subsequent data dragnets can be arranged.
This is where individuals (even English professors) can make a difference. The hardware and procedures we used to unearth Swallows are not esoteric, and others are working with similar setups at places like the New York Public Library and the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas. In the 21st century, bibliographers, scholars, and archivists must be wise in the ways of a past that comes packaged in the strange cant of disk operating systems and single- and double-density disks. Because ultimately that past is only—and always—going to be saved bit by bit.
