Conina said:
The Mona Lisa survived... but it had some changes over the years: parts of it got overpainted in restauration, the varnish got darker and the picture has experienced some warping and swelling. This doesn't matter much for a painting, since minor changes in details don't change the overall impression of the portrait. For a computer program that wouldn't be good enough, if 0.1 percent of the code (or even less) get corrupted, the whole game can stop to work. And thousands pieces of other artwork or literature weren't that lucky as the Mona Lisa and got destroyed or lost over the years: The same will happen to big parts of software and movies over the decades, without emulation and digital preservation sooner than later. |
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to find that 0.1 percent of the code and figure out what is missing though. Textual scholars have been able to reconstruct entire ancient documents by comparing copies. I agree that digital preservation will eventually be needed. Eventually all discs will fail, whether it is 70 years from now or 100 years from now. Eventually those discs will need to be ripped and their code will need to be preserved. But are emulators absolutely nesseccary for that? No.
