Abstract
Several digital spaces are now archiving artifacts from the first 1980s home computer boom. These spaces are not only storages but also social venues and “memory banks,” and thereby depend on several concurrent practices: software and hardware developed to read, run, and preserve computer code; archiving of old software, magazines, and personal stories; contemporary conferences dedicated to retrocomputing; and making artifacts, which used to be private, publicly available. The article argues that retrocomputing can be seen as a foreshadowing in terms of managing collective digital archives, memories, and relationships to digital material. Taking the Commodore 64 Scene Database as a case, this article (1) engages with both users and cultural techniques in order to (2) theorize collective digital archives as “performative in-betweens” and (3) discuss how retrocomputing may become a default mode for people seeking access to their digital pasts in a time when planned obsolescence is rampant.
Highlights
As digital culture and technological development persistently progresses, retrocomputing is becoming an increasingly prominent cultural phenomenon
Archives are increasingly mediated through their computational conditions, such as specific database formats (Berry, 2017), and this is true for retrocomputing archives dealing with much born-digital material
The socio-digital practices that emerge in Commodore Scene Database (CSDb) can be taken as examples of how an increasing number of groups and organizations will have to deal with the management of collective digital memories and cultural artifacts in the future
Summary
As digital culture and technological development persistently progresses, retrocomputing is becoming an increasingly prominent cultural phenomenon. Seeing the importance of both audiences and underpinning computational diagrams in these practices, this article analyses one of the biggest retrocomputing archives on the Internet, the Commodore 64 Scene Database (CSDb). This archive, contrary to one of Apperley and Parikka’s general claims, puts a large emphasis on the context in which the software was produced; the so-called “scene.” This is both of historical as well as of contemporary significance since the “scene” is an ongoing phenomenon, and has been for several decades. The rationale behind the chosen methodological combination is the notion that material operations of technologies are as important as the cultural practices making use of them, and that a combined perspective has the potential to generate new insights. This article examines a form of everyday relationship with our digital new media & society 23(4)
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