In Search of the Original Fortran Compiler

RBM: A Journal of Rare Books, Manuscripts and …, 2001

A few years ago, the literary and media historian Friedrich Kittler opened an essay called "There Is No Software" with a "rather sad statement." In his view, "the bulk of written texts -including this text -do not exist anymore in perceivable time and space but in a computer memory's transistor cells." Coming from a scholar who had until then situated the cultural meaning of literary texts in discourse networks dependent on technologies of inscription (writing, gramophone, typewriter, computer) and the materiality of communication, this remark captures the essence not just of a technological change but of a significant cultural shift. At the end of the 20 th century, according to Kittler, texts -and even software itself -have vanished. Our text-producing gestures merely correspond to codes built on silicon and electrical impulses; the texts themselves no longer exist materially, and indeed we have ceased to write them: "All code operations … come down to absolutely local string manipulations and that is, I am afraid, to signifiers of voltage differences." 1 Following Kittler's train of thought, we should wonder how libraries and archives will locate electronic or virtual replacements for the acts and artifacts of writing that occupied Goethe at the turn of the 18 th century or Einstein at the close of the 19th.

HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), 2021

Software Heritage in collaboration with the sciencestories.io team and the University of Pisa are introducing a new way to showcase software, that can be accessible to a wide range of software enthusiasts without any technical background, Software Stories. The project is supported by UNESCO as part of the shared mission to collect, preserve and share source code as precious asset of humankind [1]. The Software Stories interface is designed to highlight materials about a software title in a visual manner, similar to a digital software museum. The engine provides a semi-automatic tool for curators to create the presentation layer of the Software Heritage Acquisition Process (SWHAP) [2] allowing curators to generate a multimedia overview of a landmark legacy software title. For the prototype, the University of Pisa has provided three software titles that were curated in 2019 during the creation of the SWHAP. These software titles were collected and curated in GitHub and then archived in Software Heritage. For the presentation layer the collected materials and metadata were deposited in Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons. You can visit https://stories.softwareheritage.org to check the Pisa collection and watch the demonstration video online on https://youtu.be/ s6uVdRDh5Xk. With the support of 1

"Collecting computer based media -- hardware, software, digital games and media artworks, including source code -- is an idea whose time has well and truly come. Yet the collection and conservation of code is still in its infancy in Australia. Such coded works are almost completely invisible within local cultural institutions and archives. Even where coded items do exist, they are hidden and next to impossible to find, let alone access. Born digital media items constitute a form of cultural heritage. They face risks that are unique – the degradation of hardware and software, obsolete operating systems, and arcane intellectual property laws that restrict digital preservation activities, to name just a few. Too often, governments and cultural institutions either fail to recognise the precarious situation of historic code-based media, or are not able to respond in an appropriate fashion, due to a lack of resources, know-how, or sometimes, will. After outlining some of the challenges -- for institutions and researchers -- of developing collections of games and other software, this article will detail two current research initiatives. The "Play It Again" project is conducting research into the largely unknown (and sometimes hidden) histories of 1980s game development in Australia and New Zealand, ensuring that local titles make it into national collections and are documented and preserved, and enabling the public to once again play these games from the 1980s, without the need for high level knowledge of emulators. The "Australasian Heritage Software Database" seeks to draw together existing knowledge about all forms of locally-developed software in order to document it, to marshall a network of supporters, and to develop an enabling discourse that supports research into histories of software and digital preservation. Whilst these projects do not provide complete solutions by any means, a local discourse about the importance of collecting and conserving code is emerging."

As part of its program to conserve software-based artworks, the Museum of Modern Art undertook a risk analysis of  works that use a variety of software programs, programming languages, and code libraries. Risks assessed in this study include the potential impact due to changes and upgrades to hardware, operating systems, and programming languages that would render the software obsolete. The assessment made clear that one of the museum's primary conservation strategies should be building technical documentation about the artworks. Consequently, the museum undertook a second project to build documentation about the software and hardware dependencies for  software-based works. While analyzing artist-rendered source code, the researchers in some cases discovered hidden information about the working methods of the artists and their programmers. This information includes the development of aesthetic properties such as color, movement, and sound. The discovery of these clues to the artists' concerns broadened the scope of the research to include an argument for source code analysis as a tool for technical art history. In this article the authors describe the potential for adapting documentation methods from software engineering for conservation purposes, and further argue for using these methods in art-historical research.

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IEEE Software, 2002

ACM SIGCSE Bulletin, 2008