Should we cover preservation of hardware too?

It's fortunate that Jordan Merchner's source code for Prince of Persia on the Apple II that he wrote back in 1985 was successfully preserved and posted to Github.

He does mention that it would have not been possible without the aid of Jason Scott and Tony Diaz and their well maintained vintage macs. It got me thinking as to whether or not we could possibly cover the preservation of hardware, within a reasonable scope.

Adam-E

• discussion
• scope

Comments

Answer by Paul Wheatley

I think that some questions relating to hardware preservation should probably be in scope, but finding an appropriate balance will not be straightforward. Testing the water by first posting the question on meta, might be a good approach.

High level questions might well be in scope. Asking what kind of capacitor to use in a particular circuit would be more suited to the Electrical Engineering Stack.

Comments

• John Lovejoy: I would think that hardware questions such as "I have a that I need to get the data from, how do I do it?" type of thing should be allowed. I imagine that we would soon get a body of knowledge about lots of different types of media. Questions like "What is the best media to store stuff?" would be less appropriate. As @Paul Wheatly has said, it may be difficult to get an appropriate balance. It may also be difficult to codify any rules.
• Bill Lefurgy: Questions about emulating hardware environments probably should be in scope as well. But when it comes to questions about preserving specific kinds of hardware I'm less sure.

Answer by db48x

Emulation of old cpus should be entirely in scope. It's probably the only reliable way to run old software, especially if we can collect HDL implementations to be used with FPGAs.

Comments

• Paul Wheatley: I agree emulation is definitely in scope. Emulation is very different from preserving hardware however, even though the aim can be the same....
• db48x: Yes, I think preservation of hardware or manufacturing is the grey area. I think we should try to include even those, although we'll get a lot of duplicate questsions about preserving cds. http://digitalpreservation.stackexchange.com/questions/79/how-do-i-backup-and-restore-a-game-boy-cartridge-save-file is a great hardware-preservation question, for example.