New article on Vintage Computer Festival website

I just posted the paper I gave at an archaeology conference in Vienna, Austria, earlier this week. It's titled, "The Valley of Lost Data: Excavating Hard Drives and Floppy Disks" and was written with Christine Finn, author of _Artifacts: An Archaeologist's Year in Silicon Valley_ (http://www.artifactsthebook.com). You can find it here: http://www.vintage.org/cgi-bin/content.pl?id=004 Abstract: This paper explores some ideas concerning computers as repositories in the sense of archaeological sites containing data - objects, bodies and so on. The authors, who are both involved in computer history (one an archaeologist and writer on the subject, the other a leading collector and curator of vintage computers in the US) will consider the ways in which material in a computer may be accessed in the manner of evidence extracted The paper will look at the type of data stored, the hardware and software implicated, and the ways in which it can be retrieved. They will discuss issues concerning the ethical retrieval of such data and the time-frame involved in the transformation of material to a state of inaccessibility. Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ International Man of Intrigue and Danger http://www.vintage.org