Marc Weber
email: marc@webhistory.org

Exhibiting the Online World: A Case Study

Keywords: Online, Web history, Internet history, networking history, cyberspace, computer history, exhibit, museum, social media, Computer History Museum, computer, telecommunications

ou non, émanant des établissements d'enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés.

Introduction

"Writing about music is like dancing about architecture" -origin uncertain, often attributed to Martin Mull Of all the areas of computing and telecommunications history, the online world is perhaps the most obviously and personally relevant to a wide variety of audiences. Whether you're a Maasai tribesman buying and selling cattle on your mobile phone, or a Norwegian bride walking to the altar with the groom you met online, it is hard to think of an area of modern life that is not being radically changed by the Web, the Internet, and mobile data. It is also hard to think of a field where even the wilder hyperbole about its importance has a better chance of turning out true.

When it comes to making online history relevant, that's the good news. The bad news is that the mercurial, complex, immaterial reaches of cyberspace are some of the hardest subjects to pin down and effectively display.

There are two main problems. First, the online world is insubstantial and more of a process than a thing, offering few easily exhibitable forms. Second, it's complicated. The same wide-reaching impacts that make cyberspace important also mean that even its simplest stories quickly involve different technologies, and geographies, and politics. Telling them often requires a heavy burden of context and framing "backstories" just to make them intelligible.

A further wrinkle is that many people barely realize the online world has a history at all, or that its predecessors have potential lessons to teach us that go far beyond computing and touch on the most basic ways we share, navigate, and create knowledge.

At the Computer History Museum, we grappled with all of the issues above when we developed our permanent exhibition "Revolution: The First 2000 Years of Computing," which opened at the start of 2011. Taken together the "Networking and the Web" and "Mobile Computing" galleries, which I curated, form the first comprehensive exhibit on the origins of the online world. The parallel Web version of the exhibition1 contains all of the same content plus more. We've continued to refine our palette of techniques with a temporary exhibit on the origins of "surrogate travel" and Google Maps with Street View 2 , and with our current project, an upcoming exhibit on game-changing software 3 that will include in-depth case studies of Wikipedia, SMS text messaging, World of Warcraft, and iTunes. I'm the curator for all but the latter two.

We hope that by sharing these challenges and the solutions we chose, we may contribute to an exchange of ideas. A critical-long term goal of our Internet History Program is to make the history of the online world more accessible and useful, both to the public and to decision makerswho can draw from the lessons of its past in determining its future.

Exhibiting the Immaterial

The online world that increasingly absorbs our time and energy, fills the business pages of now-online newspapers, and makes or breaks regional economies is quite insubstantial. If an observer from the past were to land in our time, he or she would be struck by how many people were staring into glowing, flickering, ever-changing rectangles. Some of the rectangles are hand-sized, like your smartphone. Others sit on desks or stands. The biggest cover walls. In the future, personal ones may be constantly suspended on the edge of our vision in heads-up displays like Google Glass. The Onion satirized this modern reality with "Report: 90% Of Waking Hours Spent Staring At Glowing Rectangles." [START_REF]Report: 90% Of Waking Hours Spent Staring At Glowing Rectangles[END_REF] An obvious technique for physical exhibits, then, is to pin and display some of the fleeting images on those glowing rectangles onto yet more special rectangles within the gallery, in the form of screenshots. We do exactly that, as you can see in these pictures from the "Web" gallery of our permanent "Revolution" exhibition (Figs. 2 and3). The Museum's VP of Collections and Exhibitions, Kirsten Tashev, intentionally took this a step further when she reversed the usual order of exhibits and put the screenshots up high as the star attractions, with a few intriguing objects in cases below to add texture. With the vivid lighted images and jewel-like detail of the objects, it is a powerful, sometimes beautiful technique.

But of course the online world is not just static images. It is more like an ongoing conversation, or a literature; an interactive experience that unfolds over months and years of practice and immersion. How can a visitor break into such an extended conversation in just a few minutes?

An obvious answer is to provide re-creations of the live online system itself. Simply let the visitor login to Minitel, the French online system that was a 1980s dress rehearsal for the Web, or browse early Web sites on original browsers, or surf the rich online discussions on the PLATO educational system. After all, the four playable games in our "Games" gallery -Pong, Adventure, PacMan, and Spacewar!are extremely popular interactives (Figure 4). Alas, it's not always so straightforward when it comes to complex online systems, whether Gopher or Minitel. Even if the original software exists and can be run reliably, there's a big potential obstacle: Learning! Games are literally designed to be fun. They're also designed to be quick and easy to get started, however hard to master.

Online systems are different. You may remember your early ventures into cyberspace through the glow of nostalgia. Or perhaps with mild disdain for what now seems like rudimentary technology. But either way, it's easy to forget the hours and the false steps it took your newbie self to get comfortable on the Web, or CompuServe, or whatever.

Navigating a new piece of software can be work, even if it's interesting. Three years ago the Museum helped host a spectacular multi-day commemoration of the 50 th anniversary of the PLATO online system. As part of it the people at the PLATO History Foundation lovingly assembled a collection of PLATO terminals from several eras, connected to a working re-enactment of the system. For original members of this close-knit community it was clearly an important, even moving experience to login once again to the familiar orange screens. But I noticed that my feet weren't pulling me toward the re-enactment area where the terminals sat in front of low, comfortable chairs. It seemed like the kind of task to do at home or at my desk rather than in the middle of a conference. Now there were pioneers to meet, pictures to take, tasks waiting in my inbox. I eventually pushed myself, and spent quite a while playing with PLATO Notes and various educational modules. It was easy to use, and just as innovative as the old-timers said, and I'm glad I did it. But I've been studying the online world for nearly two decades. If a Web historian has to push himself to play with a historic system at an event, how much interest can you count on from the average casual museum visitor, pressed for time on a gallery floor?

It is also hard to say whether my session of mostly poking around and figuring out the lay of the land gave me any real sense of what an experienced PLATO user would actually do online. I imagine he or she would be more likely to jump straight into a rich conversation thread, for example, than spend time trying to figure out the commands that make PLATO Notes work. It can sometimes be more useful to look over the shoulder of an experienced guide than try to improvise a self-guided tour. Why not video where the expert goes, like a dashboard camera in cyberspace?

That's what we did in the Web gallery of "Revolution", where visitors can watch Web pioneer Kevin Hughes demo and explain a variety of key sites in "Surfing the Web in the Early 1990s" (Figure 6). It's also how we show the pioneering 1978 Aspen Movie Map in our temporary exhibit on the history of "surrogate travel" and Google Maps with Street View. A common rule of thumb with museum interactives is that they have less than 30 seconds to "hook" the visitor with some rewarding experience before the visitor loses interest, and if the hook works, perhaps another three to four minutes for the whole interaction. When it comes to raw, live content, many video games can and do make the cut. Surfing simple and appealing historic Web sites should also work wellat least as long as Web-surfing remains a familiar act for most visitors! But just as in the physical world, when it comes to more complex online tasks or environments visitors often benefit from a guided tour. These can range from simple video clips of online systems (Figure 7), narrated or not, up to various kinds of structured interactives. For instance, our upcoming Wikipedia exhibit may include an interactive that guides visitors through the basic process of editing Wiki articles. The structured portion of our Google Earth interactive lets users choose guided tours of historic Silicon Valley sites from the Hewlett-Packard garage to Netscape (Figure 8). But once at those sites, they are free to browse independently.

The rules change for the Web version of exhibits. Here the visitor is often comfortably seated somewhere quiet, rather than slogging through a gallery with finite energy and time. As we discover stable, permanent emulations of past online systems we hope to link to them from the Web version of "Revolution," [START_REF] Maslow | A theory of human motivation[END_REF] which includes all the content in the physical exhibition plus more. In my view, online is the right place to freely explore ancient online environments. This is where interested visitors, researchers, and students may truly get to know the many "webs" that came before the Web at their own pace. Of course, only a few historic online systems are available in emulated form. Of those that still exist at all, a number require original hardware, which has its own issues; old computer equipment is mostly fragile, sometimes rare, and requires ongoing investments of time and money for maintenance and training. The result is that such setups are easiest to use occasionally or intermittently. Examples include special events, such as the PLATO commemoration, and scheduled demonstrations.

For instance, the Museum does scheduled demos of restored or historic machines including an early 1960s DEC minicomputer (where visitors can play the first shootem-up game against its creator), a medium-sized 1960s IBM business computer, and a mechanical Babbage Difference Engine. The PC "Explainer Stations" in development will give visitors hands-on experience with classic Macs and IBM PCs with a docent available to assist. A very early Galaxy arcade game is on temporary exhibit and fully playable. Similar models could be extended to classic online systems. In general, one of the biggest obstacle to direct re-creations of online systems is social interaction. A standalone early Web site or 1980s Minitel site is still quite meaningful without other live users. But a 1980s CompuServe chat room, a virtual world from the 1970s on, or a modern Twitter feed is far less so. To re-create such systems is like trying to freeze and reproduce the back and forth of a live, group conversation.

For highly social online systems like virtual worlds, some researchers have essentially had to give up on trying to meaningfully preserve the system itself. For them, video has become a standard way to capture the look and feel of the online experience not just for exhibits, but for preservation purposes. As the Web returns to the more social models and user-generated content that marked many early systems, the preservation of ordinary Web sites may face similar issues.

Audience Appeal

Objects vary a great deal in their natural "exhibitability," to use an awkward-sounding term. The spectrum can resemble Maslow's hierarchy of needs [START_REF] Blum | Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet[END_REF] in reverse, running from the personal and visual down to the dry and abstract. At the top might be paintings and sculpture, since like most art they are purposely made to be interesting. High up, too, are small personal objects, jewelry and watches and such. Such items are carefully designed and easy for a visitor to "read." Their use is usually clear, as is their connection with the lives of their one-time owners.

Objects linked to taboo subjects like sex and violence score high, of course, from flint daggers to lingerie. Then there's nearly anything connected with vehicles, old or new, which perpetually fascinate, and all manner of machines with shiny moving parts. Then come the rest, wending their way down to things like ordinary documents and the sorts of anonymous enclosures that house much "back end" computer equipment. A number of computers and peripherals themselves can push one or another of the hot buttons above, from those in vehicles (Lunar Lander computer), to weapons (fire control computers), to clothing (wearable computing), and more. Some manage to tick multiple boxes, like the guidance computers for intercontinental ballistic missiles.

As we move closer to the online world, the easy pickings get scarcer. But there's still one relatively rich vein of "exhibitability": mobile computing, whose later history veers almost completely online. The little computers are a relative snap to display, since they're small and intimate enough to get much of the same design treatment, and human connection, as other poignant personal objects. Though in one sense they are just more life support systems for "glowing rectangles", mobile computers are far more different from each otherand thus intriguingthan their full-sized desktop cousins.

But the problem of how to show off their little rectangles remains. The thorniest question with the Mobile Computing gallery in "Revolution" was whether and how to show the actual contents of the screens, the software that makes them go. No option is perfect. To not show the screens at all would be like showing half of the device, especially with smartphones and handhelds where the software is often completely integrated. Trying to mock up the screen in place would look fake, the way smartphones are displayed today at stores that lack the budget for live demo models. The compromise we settled on is to show screenshots in a rotating picture frame positioned behind a cluster of machines. When we can find contemporary ads that clearly show the screen, we use those.

Exhibiting the Invisible

There is a final frontier, a place where the last crutch of easily exhibitable items gets kicked away. Behind the glowing screens that while away our hours lies an enormous infrastructure, one that runs out from our home Ethernet routers and spans the globe with wires, and server farms, and undersea cables, and satellites, and radio towers. The recent book Tubes by Andrew Blum7 explores this physical structure of the online world. But even though there's so much physical stuff, millions of tons of equipment power-hungry enough to suck down over two percent of the world's total production of electricity, there's a big problem when it comes to putting it on display. Much of it looks the same, and has for decades. Even removing a front panel often just reveals standardized circuit boards and power supplies with few obvious differences to the layperson's eye. In fact, it can be hard to tell from just looking whether, say, a given set of featureless cabinets in a windowless back room are for computer networking or telephone systems.

So how do you exhibit these underpinnings of the online world, explain the origins of the "plumbing" layers like the Internet where bits get moved aroundbut there may not even be any friendly screens or human interface of any kind? In developing the "Networking" gallery of "Revolution," this was precisely the challenge.

You can see gears move on a steam engine, or a Babbage engine. Even the old electromechanical telephone switches are impressively intricate and physical. But you can't see electrons move over a network. The action, the variety, the magic that eventually brings our screens to life is all on the inside, invisible. Also barely visible are the marks of the bitter, decades-long standards wars that form much of the history of networking.

Had ARCNET won the battle to wire the office instead of Ethernet, the only obvious difference might be a slightly different shape of connector to plug into the back of your machine. Had the French CYCLADES network become the standard for connecting networks to each other, instead of the now-familiar Internet protocols, there might be no physically visible difference at all. The equipment could look just the same. But the economics of the online world, the balance of power over standards, and in some cases what you can and cannot do on your glowing screens would be quite different.

So what do we do in the "Networking" gallery? Of course we show particularly meaningful or representative examples of the sorts of often "faceless" behind-thescenes equipment that makes the online world run: a refrigerator-sized hardened IMP from the original ARPAnet; a Cisco router; a dish antenna; a Google server rack, and so on. But one or two of each major class of equipment is usually enough. Beyond that, exhibiting a networking design like packet switching or a standard like Ethernet is rather like displaying the wind. Invisible itself, it can still be seen by its effects. This is where you enter the same rarefied realm as exhibits on other abstract topics, from math to the hard sciences, or on processes like cellular respiration. The solution is to sharply outline the impact of the law, or concept, or other insubstantial thing on the tangible world around it. You show its effect through people, objects, interactives, and other things that do have a clear exhibitabilityand become a kind of bait. It's like boldly outlining the visible arc of grass and trees as they bow to the unseen wind.

When creating an exhibit you have the luxury of hindsight. So those visible effects don't necessarily have to follow chronology. For instance, we start the "Networking" gallery with a common grounding theme throughout the exhibition; tracing the old roots of the subject to be explored. Here this takes the form of an interactive telegraph key. Visitors can tap out their initials, and feel under their fingers the staccato manifestation of the 200 year old "big idea" that underpins nearly everything in the gallery and the Museum: Transporting information over electrified wires. Over the centuries the wires have shrunk too small to see, and the switches have gone from something that filled your hand to millions per square inch. But the principle is the same, from Morse keys to ENIAC to the iPhone. The gallery briefly luxuriates in the gorgeous polished brass and delicate visible gears of the ultra "exhibitable" equipment from the first wired world, that of 19 th century telecommunication. It shows early modems and a teletype. But then it tells the rest of the story with an increasing palette of indirect techniques. The principles of packet switching get covered in an animated movie. Pictures and stories about people from the colourful networking and personal computing legend Bob Taylor, to Al Goreliterally flesh out the conflicts and ideas that drove the effort to tie computers together into a world-spanning net. Internet protocols get represented by a lovely scale model of the research van where they were first fully tested; the real van is under a cover in back of the museum. Books, t-shirts, and reprints of newspaper articles come in to illustrate particular points. A variety of network connectors show some of the few visible manifestations of the bitter and costly standards wars that raged through the 1970s and '80s. More than half of the stories in our upcoming exhibit on game-changing software are about the online world. They will draw on and extend the full palette of techniques we've used to tell online stories in "Revolution." But the structure of this exhibit, "Make Software, Change the World," highlights another technique in itself: the case study. By going in-depth with real-world examples, from Wikipedia to iTunes to World of Warcraft, the exhibit will anchor the sometimes insubstantial tendrils of cyberspace with specific people, and places, and uses.

Between Telecommunications, Literature, and Computers

Computers started as calculating machines made from spare parts of the then-centuryold telecommunications industry. They were later converted into communications and knowledge devices. A century from now, they may be seen as part of a larger stream of the history of technology for dealing with information. But today they still straddle worlds. This creates tensions when it comes to practical exhibits. Is the online world part of computing, or of the history of books and sharing information, or of telecommunication? All solutions are compromises.

The online world doesn't appear out of thin air. Its glowing rectangles are attached to computers, and those computers to networking equipment. But how much to exhibit these physical "support systems" for cyberspace within an exhibit on the online world can depend on context. Is the online exhibit standalone, or is it part of a bigger exhibit on computers, or communications, or something else? As I've mentioned, much networking equipment is short on exhibitability. Computers themselves, though, can push some hot buttons. Yet the stories that make these computers interesting often have little to do with any online roles. For instance, the story of early Apples is animated by the rivalry between Jobs and Gates and the funkily home-built nature of early PCs. The SAGE system was a milestone for networking with 23 centers connected in the 1950s. But it was equally important for interactive computing, and use of a pointing device, and military computing, and more. Using such computers in a pure cyberspace exhibit can potentially shortchange their other roles. But putting them in other galleries reduces the stock of interesting online objects.

We put SAGE in the "Real-Time Computing" gallery, and the Apples are with PCs. Both are referred to in Networking and the Web. But it's an imperfect compromise, especially in the physical exhibit where there's no convenient way to cross-link.

Framing Complexity

Historical common knowledge is dramatically uneven. Most people have some idea of where the airplane came from, or the printing press, or spaceflight. But only a very few can tell you much about the origins of television or broadcast radio. Unfortunately for exhibit purposes, the online world falls into one of these societal blind spots.

The fact that most people are quite ignorant about the real origins of the online world is a double-edged sword. It makes it easy to offer enticing revelations as "hooks"; for instance that the Web was originally meant to be as participatory as a giant Wikipedia, or that social networking features go back to the 1960s. But it also means that exhibits need huge amounts of backstory and framing context for each section, adding to both the size of any display and to potential information overload for visitors.

Both of these effects are intensified by another factor. While most visitors have no preconceptions at all about, say, the origins of analog computers or disk drives, the Web and Internet are so much a part of modern life that nearly everybody seems to recall a few bits and pieces about how they got started, often wrong.

Paradigm-Shifting Facts

Below are examples of key facts that stretch or challenge common knowledge, requiring a great deal of context and emphasis to get across. They thus presented both problems and opportunities when designing "Revolution."

6.1.1

The Web is not the Internet! The Web and Internet represent two completely different levels of the online world. They are as different from each other as TV sets from the shows that play on them, or programs from operating systems.

To many people, the Web and the Internet blend together in a kind of cyber mush; they have no idea where one starts and the other ends, and no practical reason to care. The fact that the Web is an online information system running over the basic "plumbing" provided by the underlying networkin this case the Internetis extremely abstract to many visitors. But making this distinction is key to the narrative arc of the gallery, since each level has its own quite distinct history.

We went back and forth with possible solutions. Should we try to tell both stories in a single galleryor have two completely separate galleries, "Networking" and "The Web"? Or compromise, and have two separate "tracks" within a single gallery?

In the end we used the two-track approach for the physical exhibition, where visitors turn left for networking ("Connecting Computers") and right for the Web ("Connecting People") and follow their chosen track along the wall. Local Area Networking like Ethernet is a semi-separate branch off of the main networking track. But we created two completely separate galleries for the Web version of the exhibition, partly because there's no clear online analog to separate but associated "tracks." Both the physical and online versions have an introductory panel called "What's the Difference Between the Web and the Internet?"

6.1.2

No Immaculate Conception The Web and the Internet did not spring up out of nowhere. They each had predecessors and competitors, and are the survivors of fierce competitions for the system that would dominate their respective levels. The same is true of Ethernet in the realm of local networks.

Most visitorsincluding some computing professionalshave little idea that there were Web-like systems before the Web, or other ways of connecting computers (and computer networks) to each other than the Internet. Without this key fact, tracing the origins of cyberspace is a bit like trying to present the history of World War I to an audience that doesn't realize there was more than one side.

The cycle of invention, competition, and winnowing is a repeating theme in the history of computing and other technologies. Throughout the museum's exhibits we present not only the winning standard or company, but also explore at least a representative sampling of the losers and minor players. This structure makes immediate sense to visitors in areas where historic competition is well known, for instance "Personal Computers." But it requires more explanation for the galleries covering cyberspace.

In "Networking and the Web" and "Mobile Computing," we call out the centrality of competition in the panel text, titles, and graphics, and show at least one object to represent each major competitor. But to avoid overwhelming visitors with too many individual stories, we present the competitors as bundles. For instance, the section discussing Ethernet's fight with standards like ARCNET and Token Ring is called "Local Area Warfare". The section covering the Internet's surprise triumph over rival standards including OSI, SNA and PUP is titled "Protocol Wars"; the label for an image of Al Gore explains how his support helped the Internet beat far bigger rivals. A large lighted panel shows screenshots of a number of the Web's 1980s predecessors and competitors, titled "Walled Gardens," and the text emphasizes the "triumph of the underdog" nature of the Web's eventual victory.

6.1.3

It's Older than you Think From e-commerce to chat to social networking and user-generated content, most of the features we use on the Web today were already being used by tens of millions in the '80s on earlier online systems. But those systems weren't connected to each other.

Many visitors don't realize that the Web had any predecessors at all, as discussed in item two above. But in fact, starting in the early 1960s it was pre-Web online systems that pioneered most of the features we think of as "modern." The catch is that most of these earlier systems were isolated "walled gardens", available only to certain kinds of users or in certain geographic regions. Online systems in the 1960s through the '80s were a great example of William Gibson's observation that: "The future is already here; it's just not very evenly distributed."

A major focus of the "Web" sub-gallery overall is showing the surprisingly early origins of familiar features. It opens with a clay tablet to illustrate the 4500 year old roots of cross-references, now familiar as the clickable hyperlink. The "e-Commerce" section traces its roots to 19 th century telegraph days. When it comes to specific aspects of online systems, say chat or virtual worlds, the gallery discusses or shows the pre-Web systems where they began.

Fun Facts

But not all these "revelations" require heavy lifting. A number are easily digested, gee-whiz facts that can surprise and occasionally delight visitors. For instance:  Social and collaborative features are some of the original uses of online systems; the Web is now catching up.  The globe was wired by the 1870s. The multinational communications industry was 100 years old when the digital computer was invented in the 1940s  E-commerce, including spam, dates to the Victorian era  Most early Web pioneers thought we would use directories, like Yahoo!, not search engines like Google  Information overload is an old problem, and in the early 20 th century inspired several Web-like systems based on microfilm, telegraphy, early television, etc.  The origins of the clickable hyperlink can be traced back to cross-references between clay tablets

Conclusion

Showing online systems in a museum context may be as paradoxical as music criticism or dancing about architecture, as I hinted with the quote at the start of this paper. But that doesn't prevent us from trying to do it well. The palette of techniques described in this paper represent one set of solutions to the difficulties of representing the complex, immaterial, and dynamic online world in a static gallery. We can bring the look and feel of cyberspace into that gallery with dramatic screenshots, video snippets of forays online, structured interactives, and live emulations of some simpler online environments.

When it comes to networking standards and other unseen underpinnings of cyberspace that lack a human interface, we can address the scarcity of naturally "exhibitable" objects by emphasizing related items that are more so, from iconic hardware to portraits of the personalities involved. These indirect techniques are similar to those used in other kinds of museum exhibits that deal with abstract concepts.

The huge gap between common knowledge about the origins of cyberspace and the reality is both a problem and an opportunity. The sheer amount of background information required could be overwhelming to visitors. But by choosing simple but powerful themes, like competition, and then emphasizing them repeatedly where appropriate, we can bundle a large number of separate stories into manageable frames. If this framing is done properly, the "revelations" that follow can be a fun rather than disorienting, and an important part of the visitor experience.

A problem that no single gallery or exhibit can address is the societal "blind spot" about the very existence, and importance, of the long and rich history that produced the online world. Only time, and continued efforts to both popularize that history and to integrate it into relevant academic disciplines from Internet Studies, to Computer Science, to Sociology can gradually change the common knowledge and assumptions with which visitors approach the subject.

Fig. 1 :

 1 Fig. 1: A wearable costume of PegMan from Google Maps with Street View stands guard over the front desk.

Fig. 2 :

 2 Fig. 2: In the panel above the lighted screenshots are the dominant visual, with artifacts and text below as support.

Fig. 3 :

 3 Fig. 3: Another example of a screen as the dominant visual. The image on the screen is the original logo for what became Google, called "BackRub." That's Larry Page's hand.

Fig. 4 :

 4 Fig. 4: These playable games from the 1960s, '70s, and '80s are a popular interactive.

Fig. 5 :

 5 Fig. 5: PLATO Notes, email and discussion. Courtesy of Mike Capek I'd never used PLATO and I was curious to know what it looked and felt like. But I realized I wasn't looking forward to the actual experience of getting started. It felt like work, like a tutorial in an unfamiliar piece of software, which is precisely what it was.It seemed like the kind of task to do at home or at my desk rather than in the middle of a conference. Now there were pioneers to meet, pictures to take, tasks waiting in my inbox. I eventually pushed myself, and spent quite a while playing with PLATO Notes and various educational modules. It was easy to use, and just as innovative as the old-timers said, and I'm glad I did it. But I've been studying the online world for nearly two decades. If a Web historian has to push himself to play with a historic system at an event, how much interest can you count on from the average casual museum visitor, pressed for time on a gallery floor?It is also hard to say whether my session of mostly poking around and figuring out the lay of the land gave me any real sense of what an experienced PLATO user would actually do online. I imagine he or she would be more likely to jump straight into a rich conversation thread, for example, than spend time trying to figure out the

Fig. 6 :

 6 Fig. 6: At this personal video station, Web and graphics pioneer Kevin Hughes takes visitors on a guided tour of key early Web sites.

Fig. 7 :

 7 Fig. 7: This original early 1980s videotape shows a narrated demo of the pioneering Aspen Movie Map, which offered many of the features of Google Earth with Street View.

Fig. 8 :

 8 Fig. 8: This giant Google Earth station lets visitors take a guided tour of Silicon Valley, or explore Earth, Mars, and the Moon on their own.

Fig. 9 :

 9 Fig. 9: These early 1970s Galaxy arcade game consoles are on temporary exhibit and fully playable.

Fig. 10 :

 10 Fig. 10: Hierarchy of "exhibitability," at right

Fig. 11 :

 11 Fig. 11: In the section shown above, screenshots of the software from the physical objects on display is shown on the video screens.

Fig. 12 :

 12 Fig. 12: A related example, where the large screen handles the task of showing the Palm software in action, through old TV advertisements as well as static screenshots.

Fig. 13 :

 13 Fig. 13: A portion of the "Networking" gallery in "Revolution." An animated video explaining packet switching is in the foreground. A refrigerator-sized IMP (Interface Message Processor) from the ARPANET, which led to the Internet, is behind.

Fig. 14 :

 14 Fig. 14: Photogenic 19 th century telecommunications equipment.

Fig. 15 :

 15 Fig. 15: Scale model of the SRI packet radio van, where the Internet, mobile data networks, and voice over IP (think Skype) were prototyped.

Fig. 16 :

 16 Fig. 16: Just a support system for going online? SAGE terminal, Real Time Computing gallery, "Revolution."

Fig. 17 :

 17 Fig. 17: "Who was online?" panel conceptually groups a number of disparate systems and explores who used them. Networking and the Web, "Revolution" exhibition.

Fig. 18 :

 18 Fig. 18: "Walled Gardens" panel conceptually groups a number of 1970s and '80s online systems. Networking and the Web, "Revolution" exhibition.

Revolution: The First

Years of Computing," Web version. The Computer History Museum, 2011. http://www.computerhistory.org/revolution 2 "Going Places: A History of Google Maps with Street View." @CHM blog, the Computer History Museum, 2012. http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/going-places-a-history-ofgoogle-maps-with-street-view 3 "Make Software, Change the World!" @CHM blog, the Computer History Museum, 2012. http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/make-software-change-the-world/

"Report: 90% Of Waking Hours Spent Staring At Glowing Rectangles." The Onion, 2009. 15 June 2009. http://www.theonion.com/articles/report-90-of-waking-hours-spent-staring-atglowing,2747/

"Revolution: The First 2000 Years of Computing," Web version. The Computer History Museum, 2011. http://www.computerhistory.org/revolution

[START_REF] Maslow | A theory of human motivation[END_REF]. A theory of human motivation. Psychological Review, 50(4), 370-96.

Blum, Andrew. Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet. Ecco, 2012

Acknowledgements

The author thanks Kirsten Tashev, Dag Spicer, Alex Bochannek, and Emily Routman for help and advice in the preparation of this paper, and especially for all I've learned from creating exhibits together. I also thank Lynette Webb and Google for sponsoring travel to present the paper in person at the "Making the History of Computing Relevant" conference in London in June of this year.


Helen Stuckey
email: helen.stuckey@flinders.edu.au

Melanie Swalwell

Angela Ndalianis

The Popular Memory Archive: Collecting and Exhibiting Player Culture from the 1980s

Keywords: Computing History, Digital Preservation, Videogames, Games History, Online Communities, Fan Cultures, Museum 2.0

Memories of playing games with computers have an important role in terms of documenting people's personal relationships with computing history. This paper presents and discusses the Popular Memory Archive (PMA), an online portal of the "Play It Again" game history and preservation project, which addresses 1980s games, produced in Australia and New Zealand. As well as providing a way to disseminate some of the team's research, the PMA taps into what is, effectively, a collective public archive by providing a technique for collecting information, resources and memories from the public about 1980s computer games. The PMA is designed to work with online retro gamer communities and fans, and this paper reflects on the PMA as a method for collecting and displaying the memories of those who lived and played their way through this period.

Introduction

It can be difficult to engage people with the histories of computing who don't already have a personal investment in the story. Digital games offer a useful vehicle for talking about what might be regarded by some as a dry topic. Games were the way in which many people first came into contact with computers, particularly in the 1970s and 1980s, when games offered laypeople the chance to have playful and personal experiences with the then new micro-computers.

Since their inception digital games have developed a complex and layered history, which has left its mark on the memories of game players. Yet the dramatic speed with which game technologies (software and hardware) have developed and continue to develop renders game technologies defunct at an exponential rate, to the extent that game fans have become a significant resource for mapping game history. This paper discusses the ambitions of the Popular Memory Archive, an online exhibition and database being created as part of the Play it Again Project and how it aims to collect information, resources and memories from the public about 1980s computer games.

A Played History

Videogames are important cultural artefacts in their own right but they are also intrinsically tied to the history of computing. In reflecting on how audiences might engage with the history of early computing it may be valuable to look at the importance that play has had in the story of computing and how playing games with technology has historically played such a significant role in both engaging users and showcasing emerging technology. Alan Turing famously wrote a chess program in 1947 before a computer existed that was powerful enough to run it [START_REF] Donovan | Replay: The History of Video Games[END_REF]. This aspiration of creating a computer capable of playing chess was to be the goal for many early computer scientists working on Artificial Intelligence. From the beginnings of computing history games have often been used to demonstrate the capacity and accessibility of the incipient technology. In 1951 the Australian software engineer John Bennett wrote a version of the game "Nim" to showcase the Ferranti computer at the 1951 Festival of Britain. For the display Ferranti built a special "Nim" playing machine -Nimrod, with the number relays mounted behind clear perspex to demonstrate their workings and a panel with rows of coloured lights for the gameplay. Festival goers were invited to play against the computer and watch its mathematics' ability in action. The demonstration was meant to show off the scientific prowess of the British computing company to the nation. The guidebook explained "It may appear that, in trying to make machines play games, we are wasting our time. This is not true as the theory of games is extremely complex and a machine that can play complex games can also be programmed to carry out complex practical problems [START_REF] Donovan | Replay: The History of Video Games[END_REF]." In 1951 Ferranti understood the power of games to make computers relevant or at least exciting to the public. Later Bennett recorded his disappointment with a public who mostly just wanted to play rather than engage with the maths and science behind Nimrod's electronic brain [START_REF] Bennett | Autobiographical Snippets. Computing in Australia -The development of a profession[END_REF]. But no one can deny the impact that these early encounters with playing with the computer had on some people. Despite the fact that over half a century has passed since the public got to play with Nimrod, traces of the fascination it held for them can still be found online. A 2011 query to The Guardian's Notes and Queries page includes a request from an unknown author who remembers playing "Nim", as a schoolboy, at the Festival of Britain and wants to know what the computer was. He received two replies, one which perhaps would have delighted Bennett with its tidy description of the Ferranti's hardware and operations whilst the other respondent speaks to the game, how it played, strategies for playing and confession of how as a 16 year old, he spent long hours at the display trying in vain to beat the machine [START_REF]Notes & Queries: Speculative Science[END_REF]. 1

Playful Memories of CSIRAC

Although the user group for these early monolithic computers was small the enduring fascination of playful engagement is a consistent theme of people's remembrance of them. CSIRAC, now on display at the Melbourne Museum, is the only surviving first 1 To celebrate the 50 th anniversary of Nimrod hobbyist and early computing historian Peter Goodeve created a charming simulation of Nimrod where you play by manipulating the buttons on photographs of the original 1951 display. Goodeve states that the program is built like the original where the logic is performed by "Gates' and "Flip-Flops". He explains that where he had access to detailed descriptions of the original logic he followed it almost exactly. http://www.goodeveca.net/nimrod/simulation.html generation computer in the world. Built in Australia in 1949 it was the fourth computer built in the world. CSIRAC's immense scale and massive racks of valves clearly communicate to audiences at the Museum that this is a different beast than that which sits on their desktop: it is a metaphoric 'dinosaur', a wonder from another age. 2It is not the hardware operations, however, that captures the public imagination. The stories that enliven the CSIRAC display are those of the personal and creative relationships that people had with the system. These include how CSIRAC's first programmer, software engineer Geoff Hill was able to program CSIRAC to play popular tunes such as "Colonel Bogey" which it would perform on public display in the 1950s. [START_REF]Australia's First Computer[END_REF][START_REF] Demant | Why the Real Thing Is Essential for Telling Our Stories 1 Museum Victoria[END_REF][START_REF] Demant | Institutional Nostalgia -Museum Victoria's Cabinet of Computing Curiosities[END_REF][START_REF] Doornbusch | Computer Sound Synthesis in 1951: The Music of CSIRAC[END_REF] Featured also are the games that the teams created to play with the machine. Of particular fascination was the ability of operator Kay Thorne to beat the machine when playing Dick Jenssen's "The Way the Ball Bounces". [START_REF]Australia's First Computer[END_REF] These narratives and the artefacts that accompany them, the music and the games, are able to communicate to contemporary audiences both a sense of the constraints that governed the operations of these machines and their creative potential. The ingenious ways that people found to make games using the simple input systems and displays convey some of the excitement that these individuals had in interacting with these early systems -playing with the machine and playing the machine. These artefacts express what happens when the principles of binary arithmetic and digital logic become more than mathematics and become an invitation to play.

Play it Again

The Play it Again Project which is the focus of this paper is not situated at the dawn of the computer age but rather at the moment when the computer found its way into the homes and hearts of ordinary people. It is designed to capture the memories of those people who played their way through the era of the first home computers. Play It Again is a game history and preservation project focused on locally-written digital games in 1980s Australia and New Zealand. It is a collaboration with the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI), the New Zealand Film Archive (NZFA), and the Berlin Computerspiele Museum. This paper presents and discusses the Popular Memory Archive being generated by the "Play It Again" team. The Popular Memory Archive is both a technique for collecting information, resources and memories from the public about 1980s computer games, and a way to display the results of the team's research into 1980s histories of digital game production and consumption. In this paper we discuss the Popular Memory Archive as a strategy for exhibiting and documenting the history of early digital games. This is based on the premise that there is cultural significance in these early encounters -like our friend whose unforgettable game of 'Nim' as a schoolboy in 1951 had him questing 60 years later to learn more about the computer he first played upon. And that these personal epiphanies and remembrances can contribute to building a better understanding of the history of games and computing.

History of Production

The Popular Memory Archive seeks to balance a history of production, in the specific national contexts of 1980s Australia and New Zealand, with a history of use and reception. In researching the history of production, we have sought to compile information on as many locally-produced 1980s games titles as possible. The Play It Again project has identified more than 900 locally-written titles (700+ from Australia and 200+ from New Zealand). From this, the team has selected a shortlist of 50 or so titles which will be featured in an online exhibition. Alongside this online exhibition, there will be an associated online program of 'events', in the form of a curated blog with a program of guests which changes monthly. Our selection of game titles for the shortlist has been conducted with this unfolding public program of guests in mind, to ensure that particular curatorial themes are illustrated. Curatorial themes include: the work of pioneering companies, including Beam Software; the rise of the bedroom coder; local scenes and local themes; legal issues for game archivists; and a focus on the collector. It is envisaged that these curated discussions amongst invited guests will draw out valuable reflections from them and attract contributions from others wishing to join the conversation.

Other criteria informing our selections of games are: important game designers; formal innovation/pushing technical limits; popular or nationally significant platforms; overall representation and balance; and consideration of the quality of the games. Selections have been informed by archival research, interviews and conversations with game designers, as well as systems we already have hard and software for. As much as possible, the project focuses on a breadth and depth of platforms, themes, and contrasting attributes.

History of Consumption

In seeking to understand the rise of the micro-computer and the cultural significance of videogames, the Popular Memory Archive moves its focus beyond a technology history to a history of use and interactions. This is in keeping with Patricia Galloway's call for the importance of personal knowledge in comprehending personal computing [START_REF] Galloway | Personal Computers , Microhistory , and Shared Authority : Documenting the Inventor -Early Adopter Dialectic[END_REF]. It also echoes the observation Oudshoorn and Pinch make: "Whereas historians and sociologists of technology have chosen technology as their major topic of analysis, those who do cultural and media studies have focused primarily on users and consumers" [START_REF] Oudshoorn | Introduction: How Users and Non-Users Matter. How Users Matter The CoConstruction of Users and Technology[END_REF]. Rather than understanding our object of study -1980s gamesas an archaeological and static object that exists in the past, we instead consider it as a dynamic form that continues to have a presence in game culture, living on through the energies of retro gamer communities and informing both contemporary game design and player cultures.

The Popular Memory Archive is centrally concerned with making links with a wider audience, and connecting historical research into early gaming with those who lived and played their way through this period. The collation of information about selected game titles is intended to drive the program and act as a prompt to elicit participation and materials from audiences.

Videogames are more than inert, digital code. Games theorist James Newman argues that the act of playing a videogame cannot be adequately considered or appreciated without a deep understanding of the ways in which it is enmeshed within and informed by its cultures and communities, all of whom contribute to the collective knowledge of videogame culture [START_REF] Newman | not) Playing Games: Player-Produced Walkthroughs as Archival Documents of Digital Gameplay[END_REF][START_REF] Newman | Best Before: Videogames, Supersession and Obsolescence[END_REF][START_REF] Newman | Playing with Videogames[END_REF]. Recognising that game culture in the 1980s was highly participatory, hands on, and often characterized by a DIY ethic, the project aspires to create a history of games as they have been used and experienced. We want to hear about what people did with early computers and games: what games they wrote; what these games mean and meant to them, now and then; what records they have; and what difference their involvement with games made. For the duration of the Popular Memory Archive's active life (expected to be around 18 months) users will be able to submit comments, images, video and other files to the site. Participation will be possible through uploading game capture, screenshots, photos, and the like. Participation will be encouraged through low barrier engagement such as "liking", "played", "owned". We are also considering including a link to a more detailed set of questions that visitors could complete to provide richer information for other visitors and future researchers.

Fan Knowledge

Before detailing what we expect the Popular Memory Archive to deliver, we need to detour briefly to foreground an earlier (and still ongoing) phase of the research, namely our engagement with fan communities. It was fan communities who, years ago, took the initiative to document and preserve retro games, long before there was any institutional discussion on the cultural value of videogames. Operating outside institutional structures, such groups have been able to advance their work with minimal bureaucracy: they are agile, highly focused on what can be niche-fields of inquiry, and able to draw on the combined knowledge of large communities, who operate along gift economy lines [START_REF] Baym | Tune In, Log On: Soaps, Fandom, and Online Community[END_REF][START_REF] Baym | Amateur experts: International fan labour in Swedish independent music[END_REF][START_REF] Jenkins | Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture[END_REF][START_REF] Jenkins | Interactive Audiences? The "Collective Intelligence" of Media Fans. Fans Bloggers and Gamers Exploring Participatory Culture[END_REF][START_REF] Ndalianis | Chasing the White Rabbit to Find a White Polar Bear: Lost in Television[END_REF]. Whilst many have also been involved with creating specialised techniques to help with game preservation, it is the collective intelligence that fans have of games which is of most interest to us in this context. Fans have knowledge about the playing of games, the played games and the played with game [START_REF] Donahue | Do You Want to Save Your Progress?: The Role of Professional and Player Communities in Preserving Virtual Worlds[END_REF][START_REF] Lowood | Found Technology : Players as Innovators in the Making of Machinima[END_REF][START_REF] Newman | not) Playing Games: Player-Produced Walkthroughs as Archival Documents of Digital Gameplay[END_REF][START_REF] Newman | Best Before: Videogames, Supersession and Obsolescence[END_REF][START_REF] Newman | Playing with Videogames[END_REF].

The research team, ACMI and NZFA recognize that much knowledge about the history of digital games is currently held by the gamer community. Elsewhere, we have reported on interviews conducted with two long time expert fan groups, Lemon64 and World of Spectrum, discussing the potential advantages in collaboration for both the Museum and fan groups [START_REF] Stuckey | Retro-Computing Community Sites and the Museum. The Handbook of Digital Games[END_REF]. In considering our approach to exhibiting information about -and seeking to collect documentation of -games, we have looked to the databases created by retro computer game fan sites such as Hall of Light, World of Spectrum and Lemon64. Some of these sites have existed for nearly two decades and have evolved over time, refining their catalogues and the opportunities they present for engagement as the web has grown to support more complex data and more possibilities for participation. Having engaged in this protracted iterative design process, these sites have produced archives that strive to address the complex nature of videogames and also reflect how an active user community searches and engages with this material. Sites such as these -built around digitally native content by a digital literate community -provide excellent resources, operating as blueprints for memory institutions who are hoping to work with online knowledge communities to develop resources, share information and create a broader community engagement with the history of computing.

What we Expect to get from the Popular Memory Archive and the Significance of this

We expect the Popular Memory Archive to generate oral history-like fragmentary recollections from users, whether stimulated by the monthly hosted discussions, or spontaneous reminiscences. Depending on our audience -which we expect will comprise a mix of retrogamers, collectors, occasional players, and other users who are simply interested in the issues -we believe contributions are likely to have some particular qualities. Fan discourse issues from a situated knowledge that is based on lived experience. Fans and players typically understand games as a set of experiences. Retrogamer sites -sometimes motivated by nostalgia and by a personal past with the software and hardware -often frame games in an intimate dialogue. For example the comments section at Lemon64 for "The Way of the Exploding Fist" ("WOTEF") includes people's memories of the first time they played "WOTEF" These focus not just on the game, but where and who they played with, the time it took for the tape to load and their first encounters with the infamous "Bruce Lee" scream on the loading tape.

Many retro game sites are platform specific and the romance of particular machines and their idiosyncrasies plays a major role in the hearts and minds of their user communities. Comments on such sites often offer a combination of personal passion and specific knowledge. "Forget all that Street Fighter rubbish, this is a proper fight! Get the right move at the right time and that tension of knowing one blow could land you on your arse" reflects [funky-springer] at Lemon64 on "WOTEF" in response to [melante]'s reminiscing "While IK+ ("International Karate+") can be even more fun thanks to the 3 player action, this was, and still is my favourite fighting games of all time (Street Fighter can't hold a candle to this one) Besides, this was also responsible for making me start studying karate." These two comments situate "WOTEF" within a comparative discussion of the beat-em -of which it was one of the first for the home computer (the first karate simulation) -but they do so in the voices of people who cared, including one who was inspired enough by their experiences with the game to go and study karate [START_REF]The Way of the Exploding Fist -Comments[END_REF].

Context

The Popular Memory Archive will deliver context, which is critical for creating an understanding of games for future users and researchers [START_REF] Mcdonough | Preserving Virtual Worlds Final Report[END_REF]. It can be difficult to appreciate the innovation and achievements of early video games as rapid technological change renders the most sophisticated features of 1980s games as crude to contemporary audiences. For example, the revolutionary sense of fluid control that "WOTEF" offered players through its intuitive mapping of the fight moves to the joystick is lost to a generation raised on the precision and speed of current peripherals. An understanding of both the social and material conditions of the consumption and reception of these early games is difficult to collect, preserve and display. Documenting player memories is one way to approach this dilemma and to record the experience of these games when their technology was state of the art and their designs were breaking new ground, offering new kinds of experiences.

Non-Traditional Archives

We believe that the Popular Memory Archive will yield a range of digital primary source materials and documentation, such as ephemera, images, and game capture. As part of our research, we have reviewed a number of Facebook communities who are using social media to reconnect and document their shared history. Two groups have particularly interested us: "Sharpies, Sharps and Skins a 1960-1970's Melbourne Subculture" and "I got Drunk at the Crystal Ballroom", a group dedicated to sharing memories of Melbourne's punk and post-punk subculture of the late 1970s and early 1980s. In reconnecting these groups, these Facebook pages serve as ad hoc memory institutions, archiving photos and collecting both individual oral histories and shared conversations. The "Crystal Ballroom" users have uploaded photos and scans of ephemera, and post links to footage they filmed back in the day, as well as linking out to videos of the bands from the era. This visual archive is supported by individual memories and altogether the discussion documents a detailed family tree of Melbourne's 1980s indie band scene. The collective remembering produces a richlytextured history, and a 'tested' one at that as people are quick to correct erroneous and boastful statements. The momentum created through these social media has also resulted in the development of more traditional archives. The "Sharpies" site, for example, has already supported the biography of one of its members and its user group are currently working on a book of images, short stories and biographies documenting Sharpie culture, with a second to follow3 .

Significance for the Museum

What is the significance of the Popular Memory Archive for the Museum? For some years, Museums have been inquiring how Web 2.0 can be used effectively to provide access and engagement with collections, and there are an increasing number of examples of institutions working with online communities. Galaxy Zoo, for example, invites hundreds of thousands of amateur astronomers to contribute to mapping the obscure corners of the universe. As detailed on the website, maintained and developed by the Citizen Science Alliance (which include partners NASA and Origins), "the CSA works with many academic and other partners around the world to produce projects that use the efforts and ability of volunteers to help scientists and researchers deal with the flood of data that confronts them". What Galaxy Zoo's 'citizen scientists' contribute to the project is not just data, but, through their forum discussions, they help crowd-source what is significant about the findings [START_REF] Owens | Digital Cultural Heritage and the Crowd[END_REF]. In this way the focuses of fan discourses help to build the cultural value of their subjects, and in turn contribute to shaping their value for the Museum [START_REF] Donahue | Do You Want to Save Your Progress?: The Role of Professional and Player Communities in Preserving Virtual Worlds[END_REF][START_REF] Kraus | A Counter-Friction to the Machine": What Game Scholars, Librarians, and Archivists Can Learn from Machinima Makers about User Activism[END_REF][START_REF] Newman | Best Before: Videogames, Supersession and Obsolescence[END_REF][START_REF] Newman | Playing with Videogames[END_REF].

In thinking about how to engage with game history, the 2010 "Preserving Virtual Worlds" report identifies the important work of lay historians and their efforts in building online collections, as well as developing tools for emulation and preservation. The report proposes that one of the immediate steps that archives and museums can take to assist in the long term preservation of games is the development of systems that are accessible by, and can accept contributions from, the gaming community. Rather than being informed by a static view of game data preservation, the Popular Memory Archive offers an alternative model for documenting the cultural memory around early digital games. Lisa Gitelman reminds us that "Despite the ubiquity of the phrase raw data… data are always already 'cooked' and never entirely 'raw'". Raw data "are the starting point for what we know, who we are, and how we communicate. This shared sense of starting with data often leads to an unnoticed assumption that data are transparent, that information is self-evident, the fundamental stuff of truth itself." [START_REF] Gitelman | Raw Data" Is an oxymoron[END_REF] Gitelman posits understanding data "as a matter of disciplines" -from our perspective, that of games -and in doing so, a richer understanding of data as 'cooked' phenomena emerges. Rather than being understood as bits of information or "abstract objects useful in the production of knowledge about the past" [START_REF] Gitelman | Raw Data" Is an oxymoron[END_REF] , in this project we reimagine the data we collate as a part of a collective phenomenon that extends to players. Through the collection of player memories we aim to activate this period of gaming history.

Moving Beyond the Object Focus

Operating online, the Popular Memory Archive already entails a shift beyond the Museum's historic object focus. But the Popular Memory Archive will do much more than this. For instance, to pick up on an earlier point about fans' passion, passionate voices are engaging in a way that the measured tones of the Museum are not. In examining the effects of "Discussion exhibitions" at the Science Museum, London, Ben Gammon and Xerxes Mazda note that one of the motivations for visitors to read the comment of others is that the emotive language of visitor's comments is more compelling than the display didactics [START_REF] Gammon | The Power of the Pencil Renegotiating the Museum Visitor Relationship[END_REF]. In contrast to the careful neutrality of Museum language, the passion of the retro gamer and fan captures a sense of the lived experience and its importance to the user. Oral histories, even fragments thereof, provide a nuanced and embodied relationship with the work.

Reality Check

It is always tempting in the planning stage of a project to delude oneself by envisaging an ideal response. We are very aware that the idea of "build it and they will come" has not always served the Museum well as it has moved into the online space. And we are very aware that it has taken over 10 years for Lemon64 to amass its 98 comments on "WOTEF". It is therefore our intent to work with these fan sites to collect and reuse relevant content related to our fifty selected games. This sourced material will be featured in the Popular Memory Archive with its curated "discussion" on Australia's and New Zealand games history. This naturally opens up new preservation questions as the online digital preservation environment is a hall of mirrors, but that's for another paper. There are additional challenges foreseen in a further ambition to offer 'play in the browser' versions of some of the games. This creates a series of technical challenges but also complex rights management issues as many of the work are orphanware, their publishing rights obscured by the volatility of the history of the games industry. In addition to these are the philosophical and quality issues for the Museum in providing an emulated experience. 4 These include technical challenges but also rights management and the quality of, and philosophical issues regarding the authenticity of, the emulated experience.

Conclusions

The Popular Memory Archive is not just trying to reach new online audiences but to activate existing expert audiences whose memories and skills are needed to understand the games of the 1980s era. Games are, and were, a popular media form, and so we want to hear the voices of the community who played them. Ideally the Popular Memory Archive will reflect how an online exhibition/collection can blend the voices of game designers, players and retro computing hobbyists with those of the museum professional to produce a richer understanding of this era in computer culture. The Popular Memory Archive has the potential to engage the Museum in a more transparent process of meaning making, by placing on display the ambition to allow invested communities to shape narratives, become part of the information exchange, and work to directly build the archives. It will also, in turn, provide rich contextual content that helps new audiences make connections to these objects.

It is hoped that the online catalog/exhibition will offer more than a traditional static and authoritative catalog entry reflecting the more discursive, inclusive and questioning practice of exhibition and events [START_REF] Srinivasan | Digital Museums and Diverse Cultural Knowledges: Moving Past the Traditional Catalog[END_REF]. We feel, however, that the significance of this project is to be found in the very possible scenario where games from this era stop working. Whilst "Play It Again" will be making it possible to play selected games from this era again without needing a sophisticated knowledge of emulators, if and when these games stop working, the Popular Memory Archive will have netted popular memories, together with ephemera, artefacts and other documentation. Whilst these memories may be fragmentary, told in different voices, together with different artefacts and documentation, they will allow future researchers to piece together a sense of what it might have been like to play these games in 1980s Australia and New Zealand.

Postscript

Whilst games were not always part of the official history of computers even the earliest computers had games played upon them. These early games help illustrate both how people interacted with these machines and often capture the zeitgeist of the times. At the conference one of the participants shared with the authors his memories of playing "Moonlander" on the DEC GT40, a PDP-11 using the light pen. What he remembered fondly about "Moonlander" was that a successful landing was rewarded with the discovery of a McDonald's restaurant on the moon. 5 This playful humour offered a quirky juxtaposition to the challenges of calculating deceleration on the physics simulator. The DEC-11 "Moonlander" was created by DEC consultant Jack Burness. An earlier text version of the game existed for the PDP-8 created in 1969 by Jim Storer when moon landings were a global obsession. 6 "Moonlander" features strongly in people's memories of the DEC particularly as it was one of the first computer games played with a graphical interface. It launched the popular genre of lunar landers for the arcades of the 1970s and home computers of the 1980s. [START_REF]Technologizer Forty Years of Lunar Lander[END_REF] Collecting and displaying memories of gameplay help contemporary audiences understand not just how that technology worked but how interacting with these systems could delight and enthral their users. Stories of playing computer games are thus important in the history of computing because they speak to the creative and personal relationships users had with the technology.

The use of the term "dinosaur" here is not meant as pejorative but the special value that dinosaurs have for museums where their breath-taking scale and ability to evoke wonder offers a sense of spectacle that make them perennial favourites with audiences.

Rage: A Sharpies Journal 1974-1980 by Julie Mac. Forthcoming SNAP an illustrated (100 photos) collection of small anecdotes and snippets from and about Sharpies sourced through the online community to be followed by the collection of longer pieces entitled TAILS.

Further to the quality issues of emulation is a loss of control over what audiences are actually experiencing interacting with web based media whose performance may be affected by the set-up of the client machine.

The late 1960s saw McDonald's restaurants proliferate across America with the introduction of their distinctive signage and architecture. In 1968 the 1000 th store opened in the USA. The first UK McDonald's opened in 1974.

The first moon walk occurred on the 20 th June 1969 as part of the Apollo 11 NASA mission.