Preserving our Digital Heritage

Computer hardware advances at an exponential rate and old hardware rapidly becomes unavailable. Old software which was designed to run with outdated hardware runs a risk of being lost to history. With JPC the x86 hardware is frozen in time, providing access to old software and its functionality without the need to constantly source physical components to keep old machines functioning.

In fact researchers interested in old software can interact with it via a web interface, using the JPC applet, thus providing an extremely flexible research platform.

A key European digial archiving project called planets is being led by the National Archive of the Netherlands, and a central plank of that work is the Dioscuri PC emulator. In fact we were pleased when Dioscuri chose, in 2007, to embed the JPC memory and processor emulation rather than rebuild their own. JPC forms the core of Dioscuri to this day.

The latest version of JPC represents a powerful archival tool in its own right, in fact JPC is already being used by websites for old DOS games; effectively online digital archives of classic software from a bygone era: