برچسب: Digital

This week, we discover some of
the best ways to continue using and accessing your old technology and your collection of
files and artworks, likely built up over decades. We also take a look at the ethics of digital
preservation, the techniques and skills we need to preserve what we do today,
and begin to understand why we continue to have such a reliance on using and
revisiting outdated equipment.

Drive Talkin by Mark Taylor – One of my latest artworks. Each element was individually hand drawn and painted, my usual over the top attention to detail because I love creating this stuff! Who knows, I might be the first artist to have ever painted an RJ45 cable next to a Zip Drive.

Whenever we head to the stores
to pick up the latest technology, the sales and marketing people will use every
excuse in the book to upsell us on the promise of greater battery life, a bit
more zip and a little more zap, but as an artist, there are times when old
technology is vital to the process of creating our work.

Artists frequently have a need
to rely on technology, whether it’s to market and sell our work, create it, or
write up those pesky bio’s that we all seem to avoid writing and rarely ever
revisit. We often use technology to store and preserve our work or research our
subject matter, to order new supplies, or engage with social media or just to
run our business and our lives.

Technology today is just as
embedded in the art process as the paintbrush. It’s an essential tool and often
one of the most expensive tools that we have, and it frequently needs to be fed
with upgrades and updates that will either cost us in terms of money, time, or
both.

Yet there are times when we
have a need to revisit older technologies, whether that technology is an old
school film camera because we need that particular grainy look, or whether it’s
to revisit files stored on that Zip Drive we invested in way back in the 90s.
The problem is that old isn’t always exactly compatible with new and that can
be problematic if you are looking for a specific aesthetic or you need to go
back and find a particular file.

Now I’ve bought that shiny new
thing, the first thing I need to do right after I’ve finished this thing and
that thing, is to make sure I transfer my old files from my old thing over to
the shiny new format. I think most of us decided to put our older technology in
the attic and we never did quite get around to transferring the old files to
new systems, so the ability to go back and revisit old technology is often a
necessity today rather than being only a nostalgic trip back to the past.

Preservation of old and legacy
digital files is challenging and you have to creatively think about how you
might hang on to those old files. Old technology is mostly incompatible with
new technology, but this isn’t simply an issue that blights the preservation of
the past, we’re now beginning to see history repeating itself and we might just
be sleepwalking into an even bigger problem for the future.

The digital dream we have been
sold over the past decade is to move whatever we can into the cloud, and most
cloud services are now badged as being live services which carry ongoing
subscription costs so that we can continue to access our data. We have been
sold the benefits of cloud first for at least the past five years and over the
past couple of years we have been all in.

The pay to play monetisation
model could become a problem if you’re no longer willing or able to pay for
access, but a greater problem facing the new digital world, is that many of
these live services only remain live while they are financially viable. You
might want to take pause and let that sink in for a moment, it’s not just your
ability or willingness to pay, it’s the collective ability and willingness and
the willingness of the live service to continue.

If you are looking to preserve
your modern day files or even digital purchases, there really are no guarantees
that you will be able to for the long-term if you are completely reliant on a
live service. With old technology the problem today might be around keeping the
technology alive or transferring files to a new device, but with modern day
cloud and live services, the problem is that whatever you purchased or stored
today, whatever you thought you had digitally preserved, is only ever going to
be accessible while the service you pay for continues to have skin in the game.
That doesn’t mean that your data ceases to exist but it does mean that you will
no longer have the ability to access it.

Planetary Target by Mark Taylor – One of my recent abstracts inspired by the 1980s with a focus on a cloud based future.

Live services are only live
while they’re profitable and already this year, we’ve seen very new and very
young services such as Google’s Stadia shut down, and e-stores from the likes
of Nintendo and Sony are no longer available on their older devices. This means
that whatever you purchased in the past, unless you have already downloaded it
to some kind of physical storage will no longer be accessible, and if you have
downloaded the file, there is no way to update it.

Unlike that Zip drive from
1999, there’s very little hope that you can ever retrieve information from
current or previous cloud services if those services no longer exist and again,
there’s a question around whether your data continues to exist.

For people like me who take
the preservation of old technology and files, probably way too seriously, old
non-cloud based technology and physical media will always have an advantage. If
you are saving your digital artwork in the cloud you really ought to be
thinking about preservation of those files in the future and have at least some
sort of plan to retrieve those files and move them somewhere else should the
live cloud service you subscribe to ever ceases to exist.

Digital preservation isn’t
just a present day problem with shuttered cloud services, we were once sold the
promise of a digital future that would enable us to forever retrieve our files
and our memories in the form of low resolution photographs from our early-era
digital cameras by using physical media such as CD ROMS. Video gamers and music
fans have been pushed towards the digital download, but at best, it’s a model
based on Blockbuster. You could say that at best, you’re not really buying
anything, you’re simply renting it only while the store front and storage plan remain
open.

The promise of a lifetime
digital archive of our best moments should have come packaged with a huge caveat,
the discs will do exactly what it says on the tin so long as you continued to
keep them in museum like temperature controlled environments and never touched
them. No one ever mentioned that the coating of a CD or CD ROM would oxidise or
that poor quality control wouldn’t pick up on the use of cheap solvents and
materials used to provide a ten pack of blank CDs for the price of a candy bar.

Today, we know that those
indestructible, unless scratched, CD ROMS are prone to disc rot. Yes, they
still look shiny, you looked after them and kept them in their plastic Jewel
case, but that doesn’t matter. Over time, the protective layer of the disc
which is made from a layer of thin aluminium or other metals, begins to break
down due to temperature and humidity changes. Most that exist today are either
in boxes in the garage or the attic and both of those locations are hardly
conducive to preservation.

Another big problem for those
of us who still rely on using old technology is leakage. Either the battery in
the device leaks over time or the circuit board of the device begins to oxidise
and corrode. Plastics and rubbers break down and essentially turn to mush,
frequently leaving behind a sticky residue that takes great skill and a bottle
of isopropyl to remove, often over a period of weeks or months. Once these
materials begin to break down, there’s very little you can do to stop the rot,
although you can slow it down which will give you a little more time to properly
figure something more permanent out.

As much as I love old
technology and however much I seem to dedicate my life to preserving it, collecting
it and using it, it can be a character building test at times when all you need
to do is find that one file from 1996 and display it on a modern day PC.

Regular readers will know that
I am a huge fan of old technology, my collection includes everything from the
first 8-bit home computers to a collection of computer and technology magazines
from the 80s right the way through to the present day. I don’t just collect
vintage computers either, if it’s 80s or 90s technology of any description I’m
all in, often these devices that have since been forgotten were the very
foundations of everything we take for granted today.

Preservation is something I am
way more focussed on today than I was back in the 90s, but to do preservation
properly means that you have to invest so much time in making sure that you’re
not introducing new factors that could accelerate the breakdown of the media
even further. In my mind, there is no difference between the issues we face as
artists with papers containing acids and the digital media which often
contained similar substances.

Laser Disc by Mark Taylor – Had so much fun creating this and then I spent almost a week painting a cardboard texture because it looks cool! No arty reasons other than me geek.

As an artist who has made a
career out of creating works inspired by the 70s, 80s, and 90s, with many, many
landscape works thrown in to reflect my love of the outdoors, I still use old
technology almost every day. It’s critical to get that certain look for some of
the commissions I take on, but it also serves the purpose of preserving the
technology and providing a mechanism to retain even some of my oldest digital
works.

Is it challenging? At times,
absolutely, but the real frustration is often not keeping things working, but
transferring old data to new systems and often, completely new and incompatible
formats. Is it worth it, absolutely, I would recommend everyone immediately set
up an archaeological expedition to the attic.

It’s also worth keeping those
old skills that you might have already started to forget about. Technology is a
lot like fashion, it’s cyclical, that’s why we’re seeing a resurgence in people
clambering for the distraction free Walkman’s and authors are keen to get their
hands on early internet-free word processors.

I’m not suggesting that anyone
abandons new technology to replace it and completely rely on something that’s a
few decades or even older, mostly we need to keep on top of the trends not just
for the supposedly better battery life, but because most of what we do these
days means that you have to have the latest operating systems and security
patches. If I need to apply for government issued paperwork or do my banking
online, I have to use an app or the latest browser which will often only work
if I have the latest operating system and therefore, the latest device to run
it on.

As I have moved from creating
art using more traditional mediums and transitioned to creating primarily
digital work, that means I’m heavily invested in the eco-systems of the big
tech giants. Yet, because of the subject matter and the huge amount of research
I like to do to accompany every single retro artwork I create, I still have a
need to plug in a 40-year old home computer from time to time. It might be when
I create authentic old school pixel art, but sometimes, it’s because the old
technology lets me do things faster and without any distractions.

Call me an hoarder, I think
most people do when they see my collection, but there is good reason to hold on
to your old technology. Not least that at some point in the future it will
officially celebrate its turning retro birthday and will inevitably become at
least as valuable as the price you originally paid for it, well in most cases,
but also because there could be a time when the files you have stored on the
device might once again be needed. There are other reasons that you might not
consider at the time you make the decision to either sell it, dispose of it or
give it away.

Because you have personal data
stored on it…

There are more than a couple
of reasons for not just throwing out old technology. If you have any personal
data stored on it even if you can’t access it, that doesn’t mean someone else
can’t access it. That password you used for Myspace which you still use today
is the digital equivalent of your house keys, your bank balance, and probably
your entire modern day online life. If you have used technology for a while, I
can almost guarantee that your passwords haven’t evolved quite as quickly as
the devices you are using them on.

Because, the environment…

There’s an environmental
problem facing humanity that’s not being helped by our appetite for bigger and
better. We’re all guilty of this even unconsciously, and virtue signalling by
displaying a save the planet poster and doing little else shows just ironic
humans can be. Trust me when I tell you that there are many people who will
find some use from a forty year old computer, you just think there’s very
little benefit in going there because up to date and shiny is suddenly the new
best thing.

Your memories are stored
within the silicon…

You early memories might only
exist on the hard drive attached to the Windows 3.1 PC gathering dust in your
attic. Wouldn’t it be great to dig out those very first digital photos taken on
your very first low-pixel digital camera that you were once so proud to own?

It’s your artistic legacy…

As an artist, your early work
is often some of your best work, although we never realise this until years
later when we have become less free in our craft. After years of being
influenced by thousands of other artists and seeing our skills leap to higher
levels, often our early works provide a much better insight into what
originally ushered us into our work. Going back and revisiting my older works
reminds me of everything that made me want an art career in the first place.

You might not think that your
early work is to the standard you meet today, but that’s kind of the point. How
else can you measure your own progress? It’s also worth bearing in mind that in
some cases, those earliest works could become increasingly desired and valuable
to collectors. I recently sold a work I created in 1992 and am now curating a
collection of works I produced in the mid-90s with the intention of recreating
them with modern tools.

The technology could be more
valuable than you think…

You have old technology
gathering dust in the attic but it’s still somehow in the original box, well,
given the huge increase in the number of people now getting into the retro
collecting hobby that original iPhone, old Motorola 8800, Tandy TRS-80 or if
you’re really lucky, any early Apple computer that you might have taking up
space, could be worth much more than you think. You might want to think about
getting that kind of technology serviced and maybe even insured or gift it to
my backlog of technology that I’m slowly working on bringing back to life!

Galactic Feline Goldfish by Mark Taylor – I wanted to create something different and then I was asked to create a commission to create something different. The galaxy works in mysterious ways!

I touched on some of the
technical problems that you will often find with old equipment earlier, gadgets
can be prone to all sorts of environmental factors that compromise the
integrity of the electronics and the cases or the data. But it’s worth
remembering that at one time, humans built things to last and even as recently
as the 1990s, we still had manufacturers that were proud of the products they
put onto the market and many of them hadn’t as yet contemplated outsourcing
manufacturing to the cheapest mass production facility where quality assurance
and standards can only be described as almost non-existent.

The issue we face today is
that paying a premium price for new technology is no guarantee that the goods
are going to be premium quality. I’m convinced that goods are solely designed
to be replaced at exactly one day after the warranty expires and even relying
on big brands doesn’t change this, many of the brands we knew and trusted in
the past have been wound down and consumed into mass manufacturing operations
that produce generic products with those old but well known once-premium labels
and brands written on them.

That said, there are plenty of
examples where the modern day equivalent is built with better quality
components but that’s usually as a result of the components being refined over
the years to become more reliable, less expensive or both. There are plenty of
examples where the old equipment was never as reliable as we remember it, but
there are plenty of examples where the old technology has been proven to
outlast anything built today.

The good news is that most of
the old technology that you might have sitting in the attic that hasn’t seen a
power source in three decades can be made to function just as, or better than
it did when you refurbish it with modern replacement components.

It’s also surprising at just
how often new old stock comes up for sale on market places such as eBay. Often
it will have been stored away and remained untouched and it’s not always
expensive. Today, I frequently purchase floppy discs for around the same price
I paid for them when they were being used by everyone.

I still own working Commodore Amiga
computers, I use them frequently to create artworks with applications such as
Delux Paint, the original precursor to Photoshop and produced by Electronic
Arts who are better known for creating Madden and FIFA video games today.
There’s no comparison between Delux Paint and Photoshop, Delux Paint didn’t
have layers and had almost none of the functionality that Photoshop offers
today, but it does have the ability to create truly authentic pixel art that is
almost impossible to replicate on modern day equipment or applications and
without Delux Paint, I’m not sure that we would even have Photoshop today.

Into the Blue by Mark Taylor – I originally created a version of this in 1993 on the Commodore Amiga. The new file was created using Procreate on an M2 iPad Pro with refinements created within Photoshop. All hand drawn with a stylus. If you buy a print of this, consider the acrylic block because those colours really pop with some backlighting!

Most of yesterdays forgotten
technology can be brought back to life to provide many more years of use, you
can often find modern replacement components if you do have to carry out some
first aid, and in some cases you can find components such as FPGA (Field
Programmable Gate Array) chips that can become a direct hardware level
surrogate which can reliably act as an old computer or device by replicating
the old technology directly on-board the chip.

One thing I would always
recommend is to replace older power supplies with modern ones. There are a lot
of manufacturers who can still supply a power supply that has been built within
modern day safety regulations, and using a new power supply means that you are
less likely to find other issues when you power on an older device.

If you do use old power
supplies, always check the plug. Wires work loose over the years and these
could present a fire risk, for the sake of a few minutes it could save a major
headache. It’s also worth checking online forums including platforms such as
Reddit. If you are using the old equipment there will almost certainly be a community
of people doing the same thing and they will have documented most of the issues
that they will have found when powering it up for the first time in decades.

There are a heap of reasons
why we still like to use old technologies instead of shiny new technologies
today. More often than not it comes down to it being a nostalgic anchor to the
past, but there are practical reasons too, and the use of old technology in
modern businesses is much more widespread than you might think. Alongside the
technology of yesterday, there are plenty of good reasons to keep popular past
programming languages alive and if you are serious about preservation of past
technology and formats, the old programming languages are going to be incredibly
useful but also those old programming languages are becoming incredibly useful
in supporting businesses that rely on legacy systems.

Being what some might call a
dinosaur, I still continue to use my old technology to produce authentic pixel
art and to preserve my older works but also because I still have a need to use
some legacy software that has never been bettered in the years since it was
originally released, and more often, when modern day replacements just haven’t
been created, and I’m not alone.

In the past year I have been
asked so many times to help keep legacy systems up to date, or as up to date as
they can be. There are examples of old Atari computers being used to manage
booking systems for a camping site, and the financial industry still utilise
old programming languages such as COBOL (Common Business Oriented Language), which
was first introduced in 1959 to run critical business systems such as payroll
and billing.

Fortran is still used in the
scientific sector particularly in fields such as physics, chemistry, and
geology.  C and C++ are two programming
languages that have been around since the 1970s and are still widely used
today. C is a general-purpose programming language that is used for system
programming, embedded systems, and game development, among other things. C++ is
an extension of C and is used for similar purposes as well as for developing
large-scale applications, such as operating systems and video games.

Lisp is a very well matured
programming language that was first developed in the late 1950s. It is still
used today in many areas of artificial intelligence and machine learning as it
has powerful features for manipulating and processing data. If there is one
language that might need to become better supported in the future, I have a
feeling that Lisp is on the list as AI continues its mission to take over the
world.

Assembly language is a
low-level programming language that has been around since the early days of
computing. It is still used today in applications that require direct access to
hardware, such as device drivers, embedded systems, and real-time systems, and
it is critical within some industrial processes.

This is one of the legacy
languages that I continue to use so I can create new applications on vintage
home computers and it’s a really useful language to understand when working
with emulation. It’s efficient and its ability to directly access hardware
means that applications don’t have the overhead which is at a premium with old
systems. It’s also a great way to become a more efficient programmer, a lost
art that has meant that modern day applications use much more overhead and
power to do some of the basic things you need to do when programming.

BASIC is another language
still used in some educational settings as an introduction to teaching
programming concepts. Its simplicity and ease of use make it a good choice for
beginners who are just starting to learn programming. It is a language I have
argued long and hard over in academic circles to be integrated more in school
curriculums as it is one of the fundamental building blocks that underpins
every modern language that has emerged since.

I Want My MP3 by Mark Taylor – The original MP3 Players had batteries that could be replaced, held charge for days, and were indestructible. That’s progress I guess… Once again, this is all hand drawn and painted using a stylus. Total creation time was around 9 hours.

Bringing old technology back
to life is one thing, there is very little that can’t be repaired or refreshed
these days with varying degrees of effort, but getting it to talk to modern
equipment is possibly going to be the most challenging task you will have to
overcome.

Independent retailers are
going to be your best bet in finding old mediums, if you go into a big box
chain store it’s unlikely the staff will have enough knowledge or experience to
help you figure out what you need to do to transfer old files or replace components.

With a growing trend towards
revisiting older technologies, there are now plenty of small home based
businesses and enterprises that have created entire micro-industries in
creating the components, cables and mediums that you need to make the old talk
to the new, and a lot of one time hobbyists in the vintage technology space
have come up with really useful inventions that have turned their hobbies into
fully fledged international businesses.

That tangled mess of cables in
that one drawer that you never open is worth maintaining. If you want to
revisit old technology, replacing old cables can be one of the biggest expenses.
I recently came across a cable that allowed you to connect an old games console
to a composite connection on the TV. You could have picked these up for a few
pounds or dollars even a couple of years ago, the price attached to the one I
saw in a retailer recently was £150 or $187 US because everyone had a clear out
and most of these cable were thrown away.

If you plan on using any kind
of vintage technology then it’s worth holding on to any cables that you do have.
The only cable I would say is safe to throw away would be the old Apple 30-pin
connector, but if you have an original iPhone, even that cable could add to the
already high value that the original iPhones attract.

USB cables, whether they are the
mini, micro, or the lesser used Micro-B cables will be useful for connecting
video cameras from the early millennium years. Display port cables can still
handle resolutions up to 8K, so they’re worth holding on to too, and whilst so
many people threw their VGA monitor cables away, these are becoming
increasingly valuable as retro collectors seek out those huge CRT monitors that
we all had before the days of LCD panels.

CRT TVs and monitors are becoming
more difficult to find in working condition, yet the demand for these amongst
the retro community has never been higher. If you have an old video camera or
Video Cassette Recorder, CRT TVs are still going to be your best bet if you
plan on transferring old video cassettes to a new format.

I can see CRTs becoming the
tech sectors equivalent to mining gold and it pains me to admit that I don’t
think we will ever see a manufacturer start making them again. We might remember
them as having a fuzzy picture but if you plan to use old technology, the
picture you get from a CRT TV or monitor is significantly better than you will
ever get from the latest 8K Ultra everything flat screen TV. Old technology was
designed to be used with CRTs and whilst you can source new cables and adapters
to convert old signals to newer HDMI standards that will work on modern TVs and
monitors, the output even if it is upscaled to the new resolution will be
generally pretty poor in comparison to the vibrancy of an original CRT.

There are companies, mostly in
China that purport to manufacture new CRT TVs, but most of them are more likely
to just be taking old discarded tubes out of TVs originally destined for landfill
or recycling. The tubes are placed into new plastic cases which means that the
quality will be questionable and will never be consistent between TVs. Some
might already have screen burn making them less than useful, and I would be
nervous about plugging in technology that doesn’t have to pass the rigorous
electrical standards that we have in place today.

Even if the technology is
labelled with safety markings, that doesn’t always mean that the technology has
passed any safety certifications. Entire industries have been set up in the
East to recreate authentic looking electrical safety labels, product labels and
product brand badges to feed a market of fakes. Replacement products are then
badged and sold in Western countries, usually online and shipped from China
with scant regard to safety.

No one that I’m aware of has
the current capability to mass produce CRT TVs for the domestic market today. That
said, there are specialist vacuum tube manufacturers who continue to innovate
the technology for use in industrial applications and aviation, but it would
take an insane amount of work to bring back domestic CRT TVs, and the public
would need to buy back into the technology more widely.

There is very little doubt in
my mind that there is still a market for CRT TVs, and I’m certain if a
manufacturer created a new CRT TV it would sell in enough volume within retro
and vintage collector circles to make it worth their while, but it is an
expensive technology and that would no doubt be reflected in the price they would
need to charge.

One of the stand out features
of CRT technology and indeed, even the early flat panel LCD displays was always
the amount of connectivity that they had which allowed you to connect all sorts
of devices. Today, we’re lucky if we get 3 HDMI sockets, so we often find
ourselves buying a third-party HDMI splitter to accommodate all of the devices
we need to connect to any modern display.

Connectivity with modern day
equipment is often sparse in order to keep the costs down and there’s an
assumption made by many manufacturers that we would never need to have legacy
connections on new equipment, but that hasn’t stopped a huge market emerging to
provide all sorts of legacy connections via various cables, dongles and hubs. I
checked one high street retailer recently and asked if they had a TV with more
than 3-HDMI sockets and out of more than two dozen TVs on display, only one of
them had more than four HDMI connectors with most only having three. Even when
using modern day technology, three HDMI connectors is going to prove to be
challenging for most people.

Retro Car Radio by Mark Taylor – Each of these radios and the speakers were hand drawn and painted using a stylus on an M2 iPad Pro. The individual works were then assembled in a large format work. The original and prints show the detail of the plastics, each asset took an average of 10-hours of work. A labour of love or preservation of forgotten technology?

If you think that preserving or
protecting your old personal data that exists on all of these old hard drives,
CD ROMS, and USB sticks is a challenge, you might want to consider how much
more of a challenge it will be in the future when you need to preserve the data from a
modern day SSD drive for example.

We will be facing a real
crisis within the next decade or so when it comes to either preserving or
deleting data that we produce today. We currently have things like end to end
encryption, and modern PCs and laptops come with SSDs rather than the hard discs
of the past. This presents a problem in that the data on them isn’t easy to
completely destroy and in some cases, it’s no possible at all.

The firmware on a modern SSD (Solid
State Drive) is designed to prevent sectors of the drive from being written
over. This means that the data is still present and if someone has some motivation
and the right tools, they will be able to recover it. We might also want to
preserve that data, so the challenges we face today in getting the old to speak
to the new are going to be exponentially harder because we will have to factor
in the encryption.

This raises another question,
what about all of the old technology that you have today that might have
personal data on the drives. If you are thinking of selling your old
technology, figuring out ways to retrieve your old data and permanently delete it
is imperative. Bad players are actively seeking out auction websites and yard
sales and buying old PCs, not because they are retro collectors looking for a
way to retrieve their old files, but because they know that there will be a
wealth of value in your old files, and on most hard drives, there will almost
certainly be enough data for the bad player to create a duplicate of your
identity.

I get gifted a lot of old
technology but the one thing I am careful about is whenever I come across
personal data. Even worse, should I ever stumble across corporate secrets if
the technology originated from a business. Nowadays I only scour the systems
for software that’s no longer available so it can be preserved and I skip around
anything personal or commercial, mostly because if I find it and let the
previous owner know, they will often have an expensive legal responsibility to
do something about it which they wouldn’t thank me for.  

With any kind of data
preservation there will always be a question around the ethics. Whether those
ethical dilemmas stem from the potential to view personal or organisational
data or whether it is the ethics of sourcing ROM files for use on emulators, ethics
is a big question and the answers will often lead you into legally opaque
areas. There could very well be an argument to preserve an old operating
systems code base but what about preserving modern code that is freely
available.

The counter to this is that we
were once so poor at documentation and retention especially back in the 80s and
90s, that if it hadn’t been for software piracy we would have lost so many of
the software titles that defined the early days of home computing. Today, it’s
not uncommon to find a code dump of a popular software title from that era which
is the only working example that exists. That’s not to condone any form of software
piracy but we should be trying to find a solution to ensure what we have
available today doesn’t go the same way.

I’ve often thought that the
software industry should contribute to an independent global council for
digital preservation, with developers ensuring that any code is archived for
historic purposes and access to that code could then be legally controlled in
the future. It would go some way to preserve the digital only downloads that we
lose when an e-store closes, and the original authors could receive a royalty
payment should the code ever be reused or accessed in the future. Archive.org
is attempting this in some way but it falls short in that there is no mandate
for any developer or creator to think about preservation.

Video Y2K by Mark Taylor – These were awesome little video cameras. HD in the year 2000, built in USB connector meant no cables. Hand drawn, I reused the Planetary Target abstract I created because it perfectly sums up the period between the late 80s and early 2000s when home video was a thing that didn’t need a cell phone.

I suspect what we do today with
our data will define us in about a hundred years and people will be asking what
on earth we thought we were doing. We’ve only recently arrived at a point where
we are beginning to really care about what happens to our data and the truth is,
we haven’t really cared before this point and a lot of data that we wouldn’t
want out there is already out in the wild. I think the saying goes, you can’t
put toothpaste back in the tube.

So when we talk about
preservation, it’s not just the old stuff that you need to be mindful of,
preserving todays data will be exponentially more difficult in the coming years
so it’s probably worth looking at backing up that data on physical mediums
today. The issue here is that there are few, if any physical mediums that have
the kind of storage capacity that most people would need in the modern day but
you certainly need to have a data plan, even if you only have personal data to
back up.

Optical and Physical Media:

If you are of a certain
vintage or you have ever used hardware of a certain vintage, there’s a good
chance that you might have pondered how on earth would you even begin to
transfer your old files so that they can be viewed or even used on a modern
device.

Optical and physical media is
still largely available, at least for now but it will only be a matter of time
before our ability to utilise it for preservation begins to wane.

3.5 inch floppy drives never really
went away. The 40+ year old technology has only recently been banned by the
Japanese Government for use within its own offices, and as I said earlier,
there are plenty of organisations and users who still rely on this old
equipment to run their businesses. The point here is that it’s worth doing some
homework first because the solution to do what you need to do is most likely
already being used by an entire community of vintage technology and legacy
users who have had maybe 40-years to figure this stuff out.

With floppy discs, it’s not always
easy to read and preserve original files because the discs might have become corrupted.
CD ROMS are rapidly going the same way and becoming more complicated to do
anything with for very similar reasons. The biggest issue is that modern day devices
don’t usually have the connectivity that you need to plug in old floppy drives,
and I don’t think I’ve seen a PC in at least the last five years which includes
an optical drive such as a CD ROM.

Optical CD ROM drives can
still be purchased and rather usefully, some will externally connect to a USB
port on your new PC. Rewritable CD ROM drives are also still available,
although the media you purchase for them today is generally of a low quality.

Floppies are a different
matter entirely, in part because the computer had to control when the drive
would spin, when the arm would move and know exactly when and where to place the
arm so that the computer could read the relevant data in the correct order. Modern
USB connected 3.5 inch floppy drives will have limited function for the
preservation of data if your data was created on anything other than a PC or
IBM compatible, there are options here if you find that you need a drive from
something that isn’t PC based, but most of these options will come with a very
steep learning curve.

There are various ways to
still read most of your floppy discs, although to read some formats will
possibly require you to install some kind of emulator on your modern system. The
file systems and the way files are constructed are very different these days
and older computers such as the early 1980s home microcomputers rarely had any visual
user interface, you communicated with the built in programming language such as
BASIC or any of the others I outlined earlier. If you are backing up from older
IBM compatibles and early PCs, then learning the basics of DOS (Disc Operating
System) will be instrumental to any success you have with preservation.

The weight of sledgehammer that
you need to crack this particular nut will vary between the complexity or
simpleness of the original system you need to somehow replicate and the
complexity of the modern day system you need the file to be transferred to.
Thankfully, most emulators that run on PC or Mac, or even on single board
computers such as the Raspberry Pi, will let you transfer old files with relative
ease.

If you run an emulator on a
Raspberry Pi, you can transfer files to and from the emulated system by
connecting the Pi to the PC (or Mac) through file explorer and either Wi-Fi or
via an ethernet cable. This does involve a small level of easy tinkering, and
it usually just means connecting to your Raspberry Pi via it’s IP address over Wi-Fi.

There are plenty of YouTube
tutorials that go through this and many will utilise the most likely emulators
you will be using, and the emulators really are all much of a muchness in how
they function. The difference between emulators is how well they emulate
something on your new device and some emulators will always be better at replicating
specific systems across all modern devices.

Once you know how to find the
Pi on your wireless network, you can replace the Pi with almost any device and
use the same method. If you prefer, you can use a network cable to do the same
thing and it will likely be much faster at transferring any files.

Floppy discs often take a
little more work. There are modern-day floppy disc drives available that
connect to modern equipment via USB, but there are a couple of considerations
that you need to be mindful of before attempting any type of transfer. Firstly,
floppy discs are fragile and susceptible to breaking down due to environmental
factors, and dust and dirt can cause mechanical issues with the drive and
render it useless.

Before you get too excited and
charge ahead, make sure you check every disc for visible signs of failure and
especially look out for any part of the disc that has started to erode. If you
need data from those there will be no way of guaranteeing its integrity or
condition, and it’s usually only recommended if you have some experience of
recovering data.

I regularly have to check 3.5
inch floppy discs because those are the discs where most of my early works had originally
been saved. To clean them, I use a 3D printed 3.5 inch disc frame that has
small pegs which hold the disc in place. They’re widely available on Etsy these
days and they’re much cheaper than replacing a drive. A wheel is then inserted
which allows you to turn the disc which can then be gently wiped with a cotton
bud and a drop of isopropyl alcohol.

The above is the easy part of
the great floppy challenge, the real challenge is when you need to utilise old
drives which were built into home computers such as the Commodore Amiga and
Atari ST. You have a few options here, in some cases you can source spares and occasionally
you might come across new-old stock for replacement parts, but there is no
guarantee that those parts will be available when you want them or where you
need them to be delivered.

If you have an older computer
such as an Atari ST or Amiga, the modern USB replacement 3.5 inch drives which
can be picked up for around $25 US, and around £25 UK, might share the same
disk size but they are completely different technologies. Modern discs (or as
modern as a 3.5 inch disc can be) will be Double Sided, High Density, (DS/HD)
but many of the older computers with built in drives such as the Amiga used a
Double Sided, Double Density (DS/DD) and wrote in a completely different file
format and required a different drive technology.

When this happens you might
have to trigger your inner geek and go down the route of SD Card solutions that
replicate floppy discs and floppy disc controllers of yesteryear, or you could
utilise a Raspberry Pi Pico, a small $5 single board microcontroller which will
then form the basis of a project to repurpose almost any 3.5 inch floppy drive.
Arduino boards can also be found in some of these projects, but almost all of these
will need some form of other hardware to be attached in the form of a HAT
(hardware attached on top) or will need to be soldered to the original board.

HATs or whatever term is more relevant
to your choice of single board computer (SBC) or microcontroller can be found which
perform all sorts of functions. Some will allow you to utilise original 9-pin
D-Type controllers such as those which were once used on older PCs and game
consoles, others will allow you to connect an audio cassette player so that you
can load files stored on audio or data cassettes into the emulator or core.
Most of these additional devices are inexpensive, so before you spend
significant money on rebuying all of your old cables and replacing old
equipment, it might be worth considering whether a single board computer with a
HAT device or even on its own will perform the task you need it to perform.

I’ve had some success in
replicating non-PC 3.5 inch floppy discs using an SBC together with a modern
USB floppy drive, other people have figured out 5.25 inch disc projects using
the Pico, I’ve yet to meet anyone who has come up with a way of recreating the
older 8-inch formats. My advice here is to seek out pre-built projects which
come with support because some of these SBC focussed projects can be challenging
if you’re not keen on navigating the initial learning curve.

Retro Auto by Mark Taylor – I filled my first car with speakers and only had a radio. I think 18 year olds in the 80s were all just like me!

Cassette Tape:

In the UK and Europe, disc
drives were never as popular as they were in the USA during the days of 8-bit
and 16-bit computers. This meant that while my US friends had become used to
fast loads and floppies, most of us across the pond had to load and save our
files using a very slow cassette tape that would work only when it worked which
wasn’t all that often.

If you don’t have access to
the original equipment, you have limited options to transfer cassette tape
based files. My preference would be to go with an FPGA based device such as the
Mister, but that’s going to be an expensive option although you can add a HAT
that allows you to connect a cassette player to the Mister and there will be
almost no difference in compatibility. Mostly, you will need to seek out SD
Card based solutions but that won’t solve the problem of the file being on the
cassette rather than on the device.

In some cases, files can be
transferred from cassette and recreated as a digital file using a cassette
player, a mobile phone that can listen to the audio, and an application. Most
people who use this method use it to download tape files to emulators, usually
using some kind of Android based device. If you are invested in the Apple
eco-system, there’s nothing that I’m aware of, certainly through the official
App Store that would allow you to do this.

A much easier way would be to
invest in a modern cassette player with a USB port. These can be picked up for
less than $50 US, £50 UK if you look around online, most come with some
software that will enable you to backup your cassette based music collection,
just don’t expect Dolby levels of sound quality. There’s no reason why these
same devices couldn’t do the same thing with data so that the newly created
digital data can be read by an emulator, but you will need to source some
software for your PC or Mac that will convert the original analogue track into a
file type that will be readable with your emulator.

Repurpose an old PC:

I remember a time when you
could pick up a used vintage PC for little to no money at all, and most of the
time people were happy to hand them over for free in return for taking them
away. Not so today, a 1971 era Kenbak-1 will probably cost you in the region of
$40,000 US, (only 50 were made), an Apple 1, has a current value of around
$460,000 US, but even a basic X286 PC from the 90s is likely to be worth anywhere
between $200 – $600, although you can find them cheaper depending on where you
look, the condition they’re in, and any extra’s which may be included.

Retro collectors are currently
buying up older PCs, almost anything is collectible and in demand and
especially PCs that utilised DOS, partly because of the brilliant games and
text based adventures that could be found on the systems at the time. The demand
is currently outstripping supply, so much so that modern day replica’s of older
PCs can often be found either as hobbyist builds or in a few cases, as
commercially produced systems and you might need deep pockets to afford some of
those.

If you do have an older PC and
that’s where the files you need to preserve are, the options available become
numerous and can mostly be solved with the addition of a USB controller,
drivers, or cables. If you are using Windows, you do have an option to run some
applications in compatibility mode, the problem you might face is when you need
that compatibility to go back pre-Windows 7 in most cases, it’s not a reliable way
but it is worth a try.

There will be oddities with preserving
old files if you originally used proprietary drives such as Zip or Jaz Drives, or
any number of the drives that came on the market and competed with each other
in the early days of microcomputers and early PCs. Most of these drives were designed
to tie you into a physical media format which would have been largely
incompatible with any other drive from any other manufacturer, and because
there were once so many of these things, none of them found mass traction and
adoption. This means that you are going to be limited without replacement
drives, and in some cases you might need to be creative in how you attach those
early drives to a modern PC.

It becomes slightly easier if
you have the original technology, there will almost always be a way to transfer
files, even if you need to utilise a single board computer such as a Raspberry
Pi and set up a preservation project. This is generally where emulation can
make life much easier.

Emulation:

Something else to bear in mind
is that whilst many of emulation based solutions will allow you to source original
ROM files from the internet, doing that is something that mostly falls into the
category that is a legally grey area. Mostly,  that area is not so grey in that it’s
definitely illegal even if you own the original file, and it’s something that
becomes complicated to do if you’re not used to running emulators, most need
you to perform at least some sort of configuration. The good news here is that
the emulation scene is big enough to offer support and most emulators are
similar in how they work that in understanding one, means that you can probably
tackle them all.

Emulators can emulate most
things on a modern day PC or Mac, including relatively recent video games
consoles, but that’s a completely different subject for someone else to cover.
What I will say, is that there is a good chance that you will be able to recreate
your old system on a new PC with an emulator to preserve your own original
files.

What can I emulate?

On my $70 Raspberry Pi 400, I can
emulate dozens of older systems, and almost everything I need to emulate without
turning on a modern PC. I have emulators that can recreate those old LED and
LCD table top video games along with emulators that can perfectly recreate 1980s
arcade machines right the way through to home computers and video game
consoles, although video games consoles post PlayStation 3 are few and far
between and replicating a modern console is going to tax even the most powerful
modern PC.

Emulation of early systems is
generally flawless, emulation of modern systems is almost always a choppy
experience at best, the emulators for anything from the PlayStation 3 onwards
just haven’t had enough years of development to produce a seamless experience
and arguably, that kind of technology is still relatively easy to find in
working order.

It’s also worth bearing in mind
that some emulators were written in the early 2000s and a few were created
during the late 1990s, so depending on what you need to emulate might require
you to either emulate an earlier system in order to emulate an even earlier
system, which is going to be character building, or it will require you to
track down some earlier hardware and work forwards from there.

Some of these emulators will continue
to work well despite not being updated for many years, other emulators have
huge communities that continue to develop the code to make it compatible with
modern devices. My advice is to once again turn to the internet and track down
the communities based around the system you need to emulate, and there are some
really obscure systems so chances are that whatever you need to emulate will
have someone waiting in the wings to offer some support.

Most emulators will be Open
Source and freely available, in part because the copyright still exists for
those old systems so anyone selling you an emulator is likely to be breaching
the user agreement for distributing the software. That said, there are a few
emulators that have been created by the original manufacturers or by
organisations who now own or are closely aligned to the trademark, these will
be mostly for industrial systems which are still required for manufacturing processes
and some of them will cost money.

I use emulation a lot,
especially when I need to create 8-bit images for clients and don’t have access
to the original equipment. If I work on digital assets that will be used on
original hardware, wherever possible I will create the assets on the original
device wherever possible. For preservation, I don’t think it really matters,
what does matter is that you have a file you can continue to access.

Emulation is going to be one
of the primary tools that you will have to save your old digital work and files
before transferring the old or newly created file to your chosen storage for
preservation and use. So with this in mind, it’s worth getting a basic understanding
of what emulation is and how it generally works so you can begin to apply the
process of preservation across almost any technology or file that you will need
to preserve.

Emulation is one way of recreating
past technologies and formats, there are other ways such as creating a virtual
machine (VM) on a modern PC and installing an older operating system within
that virtual machine running within a modern operating system, but it’s not a
process I would recommend if all you need to do is transfer your first digital painting
on to a USB stick, this approach would be similar to taking a sledgehammer to
crack open an egg.

A step above emulation and a
direct replacement for owning the original equipment would be to replicate the original
hardware at the hardware level as opposed to emulating via software. It’s worth
just going through a brief explanation of software versus hardware emulation.

1.    Emulation:
Emulation involves creating a software-based replica of a hardware system or
component. It typically runs on a general-purpose computing platform, such as a
personal computer or a gaming console. Emulators mimic the behaviour of the
original hardware by interpreting the system’s instructions and translating
them into equivalent actions on the host platform. Emulation can be more
flexible and easily accessible, as it allows running multiple systems on a
single device, but it may introduce some latency or inaccuracies due to the
translation process. This might still be your best bet because as I said
earlier, it matters not if you just need to preserve the file or transfer it to
modern storage mediums.

2.    FPGA-based
Hardware Replication: The MiSTer platform (there are other FPGA platforms), on
the other hand, utilises a Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) to replicate
the behaviour of specific hardware systems. An FPGA is a reconfigurable
integrated circuit that can be programmed to mimic the functions and behaviour
of various digital systems. Instead of emulating the system in software, MiSTer
or any other FPGA device recreates it in hardware using programmable logic
elements.

This
approach aims to achieve greater accuracy by directly replicating the original
hardware’s behaviour at a lower level. MiSTer uses FPGA cores that are
specifically developed for each system, providing a more faithful
representation of the original hardware’s operation. For some use cases, this
might be the way you need to go in the absence of original equipment, but for
general preservation, it’s another sledgehammer that you won’t necessarily
need.

In summary, emulation involves
creating software-based replicas of hardware systems, while running a core on a
MiSTer FPGA device uses reconfigurable hardware to replicate the behaviour of
specific systems. Both approaches aim to provide a means of playing or
experiencing classic hardware and software or accessing legacy files, but
FPGA-based replication tends to offer a more accurate representation of the
original systems because the hardware it runs on becomes to all intents and purposes,
a new version of the original hardware at the hardware level.

As for what you will be able
to preserve is really down to the “cores” or systems that you are able to
emulate. The most popular ones are listed below, but it’s worth noting that
there are literally dozens and dozens of emulators available for almost any
computer or single board computer, and there are emulator packages available
for other devices such as game consoles, Mac, and older hand held devices such
as Sony’s PlayStation Vita and the recent Steam Deck from Valve.

No More Hidden Figures by Mark Taylor – I find the history of women playing a major role in the Space race of the 60s an inspiring story.

1.    Retro
Gaming Consoles:

·       
NES (Nintendo Entertainment System)

·       
SNES (Super Nintendo Entertainment System)

·       
Sega Genesis

·       
Game Boy (including Game Boy Color and Game Boy
Advance)

·       
PlayStation 1

·       
Atari 2600

·       
Atari 7800

·       
Neo Geo

·       
Game Gear

·       
Sega Master System

·       
TurboGrafx-16

·       
Nintendo 64 (limited compatibility)

2.    Home
Computers:

·       
Commodore 64

·       
Amiga

·       
Atari ST

·       
ZX Spectrum

·       
MS-DOS (using DOSBox)

·       
Amstrad CPC

3.    Arcade
Machines:

·       
MAME (Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator)

·       
FinalBurn Alpha

·       
Neo Geo

·       
Capcom Play System (CPS-1, CPS-2, CPS-3)

·       
Atari

4.    Handheld
Consoles:

·       
Game Boy

·       
Game Boy Color

·       
Game Boy Advance

·       
Sega Game Gear

·       
Atari Lynx

·       
Neo Geo Pocket

5.    Other
Consoles:

·       
Sega Dreamcast (limited compatibility)

·       
Sega Saturn (limited compatibility)

·       
PSP (PlayStation Portable)

·       
Nintendo DS (limited compatibility)

·       
3DO

·       
Wonderswan

6.    Other
Systems:

·       
Apple II

·       
BBC Micro

·       
Acorn Archimedes

·       
MSX

·       
Amstrad CPC

·       
Sinclair QL

·       
Oric

·       
Thomson TO7/70

·       
ColecoVision

·       
Intellivision

·       
Vectrex

It is worth noting that the
compatibility and performance of emulation can vary based on the specific
Raspberry Pi model you have if you are using a Pi, and the quality of
functionality can vary between the emulator software being used. Additionally,
certain systems may require additional configuration or BIOS files for proper
emulation which is true even if you are using an emulator from a PC or Mac, but
the emulation community reaches far and wide and support is often just a click
or two away and YouTube is a great source of reliable step-by-step instruction.

It’s also worth mentioning
that new emulators and compatibility improvements are being developed
constantly, so this list may not be exhaustive and may change over time.

Rather than games consoles
where it is unlikely your original files will sit, it’s more likely that you
will want to emulate an older computer. A Raspberry Pi can emulate a wide range
of popular vintage computers, and both Mister and PC/Mac are capable of running
most of them really well. Here are some examples:

1.    Commodore
64: The Raspberry Pi and PCs can run emulators such as VICE to emulate the
Commodore 64, a popular 8-bit home computer from the 1980s.

2.    Amiga:
Emulators like UAE4All and Amiberry allow the Raspberry Pi to emulate the
Commodore Amiga, a renowned home computer known for its multimedia
capabilities. If you need to emulate on a PC, WinUAE is one of the best for Commodore
Amiga, but you could also use an A500 Mini, a replica of the original Amiga
A500 that also emulates other Amiga models. These devices are manufactured by a
company called Retro Games Ltd and are available from places such as Amazon,
and it is a hassle free way of replicating one of the best home computers of
all time.

Most
of my modern Amiga based artworks are now created on this device, purely
because it is more efficient and the use of the WHD Load functionality means
that files no longer have to exist on a single disc.

3.    Atari
ST: The Raspberry Pi can emulate the Atari ST, another popular home computer
from the 1980s, using emulators like Hatari which is a cross platform emulator.

4.    ZX
Spectrum: Emulators such as Fuse and ZEsarUX enable the Raspberry Pi to emulate
the ZX Spectrum, a widely-used 8-bit home computer primarily known for its
extensive game library and despite its limited graphics and pallets is actually
one of the finest machines to create 8-bit graphics on, if you can forgive the
attribute clash where colours overlap.

5.    MS-DOS:
DOSBox, a DOS emulator, can be installed on a Raspberry Pi to run software and
games designed for MS-DOS-based computers but it really comes into its own when
used on a PC where any old DOS based files might be found. Certainly if you
have access to a USB Floppy disc alongside DOS Box, that might be all you
really need to begin your journey of preservation. PCem should be your go to
emulator for IBM PC and clones.

6.    Apple
II: The Raspberry Pi can emulate the Apple II, a series of personal computers,
using emulators like AppleWin and LinApple. Apple II runs extremely well via
emulation on every device I have ever attempted to run it on.

7.    BBC
Micro: The Raspberry Pi can emulate the BBC Micro, a popular home computer in
the UK, through emulators like BeebEm and B-Em. There are known problems with original
BBC Micro’s with a few components that haven’t aged well, but it is becoming a
popular micro for collectors in the USA who feel able to take on the challenge
of getting a PAL rather than NTSC device to power on, and the challenge of the
power supply of course. It is an unlikely source of original files, many of
which will either reside on a floppy disc (5.25 inch, and that’s an issue
without a physical drive) or on cassette which will be slightly easier to
preserve.

8.    Acorn
Archimedes: The RPCEmu emulator allows the Raspberry Pi to emulate the Acorn
Archimedes, a line of computers known for their advanced graphics and sound
capabilities. In terms of digital art, many of the original digital artists in
the UK at least, will have had some touch point with an Archimedes and it is
feasible that old files where they still exist, might need to be preserved.

9.    MSX:
The Raspberry Pi can emulate the MSX, a popular home computer standard, using
emulators such as openMSX and blueMSX. MSX was a standard rather than a
computer and it was a standard that went beyond home computers. MSX was an
abbreviation for Microsoft Extended Basic, so if you do have original files
from this system it is likely that you can find far easier creative ways of
preserving them because the language was largely shared between lots of devices
from the period and it is well supported by emulators today.

The
standard wasn’t as widely adopted in the West but it remained popular in Japan
and the far east more broadly, but it had some limitations mostly as a result
of each manufacturer utilising the standard but then making significant changes
between models that made them incompatible.

10.                  
Tandy TRS-80: Emulators such as XRoar and MAME
can be used to emulate the Tandy TRS-80, a popular line of microcomputers
produced by Tandy Corporation that found traction in the US especially where it
was affectionately better known as the CoCo or Color Computer. If you were
getting into computers during the 80s in the USA, the TRS-80 could very well
have been one of your first forays into home computing. If it wasn’t the Tandy,
then it was likely to a machine from Commodore or Atari.

This really does demonstrate
the breadth of the possibilities for emulation which should make any
preservation projects much easier, and aside from the consoles, most of the
home computers above had at least some level of graphic capability that would
lend itself to the creation of digital art.

Telepoint 92 by Mark Taylor – A precursor to the modern day cell phone, these telpoint handsets could make calls within range of a base station which could be found in restaurants and service stations along major traffic routes. When they worked… Again, this piece is all hand drawn. I would love to find an original one of these today!

It’s not just art assets that
you might need to recover from old data storage mediums, recently I had the
pleasure of recovering a lost unpublished manuscript on behalf of a collector
of my work who also happens to be a writer. Originally created in  Word Perfect during the early 1980s it had originally
been stored on a 5.25 inch floppy, was later transferred to a 3.5 inch floppy
which is where it remained until two weeks ago. It’s now stored on a USB memory
stick with multiple copies in the cloud!

I’m not sure if video ever
killed radio or whether Netflix truly killed video, but I do know that there
are still millions of VHS and Betamax video tapes filled with distant memories languishing
in cardboard boxes. There may even be a couple of Video 2000 cassettes
somewhere amongst them too.

Preserving video footage from
old 8mm film and VHS tapes was for a while during the early 2000s, a widely
held skill. We had begun to see the emergence of recordable DVD players and
many of us would attach our decades old failing videocassette players to them
and transfer our VHS tapes so that we could preserve our videocam memories onto
CD-RWs.

We did the same with Vinyl
records when as the audio cassette became popular when Sony gave us the
Walkman. Everything is cyclical, Walkman is back as a brand, vinyl outsells CD,
Blockbuster still exists in Bend, Oregon, and a handful of new video rental
stores have begun to remerge over the past couple of years.

Maybe it’s the social event of
selecting a title at the gathering in the Church of Hollywood on a Saturday
night, and the shear profit that can be made from selling popcorn and Ben and
Jerry’s. Who knows, maybe it’s just a nostalgia thing that we’ll move on from.

In every attic in the land
there exists a cardboard box, and where there’s no cardboard box there is a gap
that memories of past technologies fill. In that box there will be a mish mash
of blank tapes from every conceivable format that we bought into as the next
big thing as we listen to the shouts of, “we want our memories back”.

Thankfully there’s both an app
and a dongle for that, what a time to be alive. The missing bit is the
technology that is still needed to spool that magnetic tape into a muddled mess
because the heads need cleaning. If we can lay our hand on a bargain eBay video
cassette player, we now have options.

Connecting a VHS player to a modern
display is going to be your next mission, for this you will need at least a
composite to HDMI adapter. These are cheap enough but buyer beware, the
cheapest will degrade an already degraded film even more.

You might want to spend a
little more and buy some upscaling technology, or you could find a specialist
who preserves and transfers old film, there are plenty of small independent
businesses that have managed to somehow continue making a living out of
transferring old film formats to digital files and often they can tackle the
preservation of other file types too.

You might need to borrow or
buy a playback device, there are still plenty of working video cassette
recorders on sites such as eBay, my advice is to avoid the listings that
suggest what you are buying is super rare, the reality is that very few of
these devices are going to be worth more than $50 US or £50 UK. The exception
will be the devices that combine recordable DVD and Video Cassette, and because
many were manufactured without a recordable DVD, you may have to pay a premium
for these. If you already own the playback device, you will need to get it connected
to your TV or monitor, thankfully you can easily pick up composite to HDMI
cables, although in some cases you may have to use a combination of cables,
bearing in mind that the more connectivity you place between the player and the
screen, the poorer the quality  of
picture you will see.

To counter this, I would be
minded to play the footage back through a video capture device or card, and
again, these are readily available but I would go for something that will
upscale the resolution, and I would avoid the really inexpensive devices
because they will either lack in the sound department or the display, often
both. Get the best you can afford.

Transfer of video is usually as
simple as starting the playback on the device and using video capture software.
I would avoid any software bundled with capture cards that have been purchased
online, you will have no idea if that software contains any malicious code.
Stick to something like Premier Pro or any of the free video editing suites
such as Da Vinci Resolve or OBS Studio if finances are stretched.

Just remember to clean the heads
on the playback device using isopropyl alcohol before you start, check the
medium containing the footage for any signs of degradation, and make sure you select
the correct input source on your software.

Once you have a digital file
you can then begin the real clean up process using the video editing software.
You will need to follow similar principles for audio tapes and CDs, but the
process for capturing sound is generally much easier than it is for video.

TV 1974 by Mark Taylor – There was nothing like a game of Tennis on the TV in the 70s! Hand drawn because I don’t believe in AI – unlike so many artists these days who love nothing more than to press a button. I have views I will one day share, but in the meantime, lazy, get a grip.

Organisations such as the
Digital Preservation Coalition are excellent sources of information that will
help you to preserve all of your digital files, and they provide deep insights
into how you might want to pre-plan any future preservation requirements which
is essential if your current work involves digital assets that you will want to
continue to own or have available.