DID YOU KNOW that you can, right now, for free, go to Archive.org, the great online library of all things, and load up within your web browser an ancient, decrepit emulated computer-a DOS box from 1991, a black-and-white Mac, a green-and-black Apple II-and run the WordPerfect of yore, boot old HyperCard stacks, or use 1979's VisiCalc as God intended?
Perhaps this does not seem miraculous to you. Fair. Moore's law has taken us from 250 billion or so CPU churns per year on the earliest Macs to a quintillion potential clock cycles on a good gaming PC, a healthy 4,000,000X increase. Anyone with sense might reasonably ask, What? Why use a shiny new computer to run old spreadsheets? And I might nod and shrug, but inside I am a translucent plastic iMac of emotion. Because it is, I think, important to emulate.
You can learn history by reading books and visiting museums; you might even walk a battlefield. But you can't understand software from screenshots any more than you can understand music from album reviews, or baseball from box scores, or Rome from watching gladiator movies, much as you might enjoy gladiator movies. When you boot up a virtual version of a Macintosh from 30 years ago, you share in the lived experiences of millions of ancient humans. You can see how they spent their paltry CPU budget to fill their low-resolution screens.
This story is from the October 2022 edition of WIRED.
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This story is from the October 2022 edition of WIRED.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
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