Emulation for Archivists
Example Cases
To better understand what emulation can do and what it can be used for, let’s look at the following two examples.
Archivists and cultural heritage institutions have utilized emulation for accessing digital artworks. In 2014, Iontank, a specialized design studio developing interactive art installations and software systems, worked with the Andy Warhol Museum to display digital artwork created in the 1980s on the Commodore Amiga 1000 computer. Iontank created their own Amiga 1000 emulator to make the files, which were stored on a floppy disk, viewable. In addition, the company preserved the "look and feel" of viewing the artworks on the same computer, just as if one were doing so back in the 1980s. Decommissioned Amiga 1000s were used for the display and the internal components of the computer were replaced with new hardware. Read more about their work and view the photos here(opens in a new tab).
More recently, the Born-Digital Preservation Lab at Stanford University Libraries used emulation to access “The Would-Be Gentleman,” a floppy disk simulation created by Stanford history professor Carolyn Lougee in 1985. The simulation was originally used for her History seminar “The France of Louis XIV.” To conduct this work, the Digital Archivist at Stanford University partnered with the Software Preservation Analyst at Emulation-as-a-Service Infrastructure (EaaSI), a group of organizations working together to develop technology and scale of Emulation-as-a-Service software. A main hurdle in their work included uncertainty over which emulator to use. Read more about their work here(opens in a new tab).
