[game_preservation] Video game legal archive

[Henry Lowood]

Marty,

The article was published in IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 
last year.  

Not sure if you have access to this resource, but here is a link to the 
journal issue, with my introduction (I edited the issue) and the other 
articles, along with mine:
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/ieee_annals_of_the_history_of_computing/toc/ahc.31.3.html

Here is the abstract, with links, from the IEEE.  Again, not sure if you 
have access to this resources.  If you do, you can follow this 
information to the .pdf, which is the link below the abstract.  Oh, and 
yes, the process was very expensive to get those records.

	
 

Videogames in Computer Space: The Complex History of Pong

*Lowood*, H. 
</search/searchresult.jsp?disp=cit&queryText=%28%20lowood%20%20h.%3Cin%3Eau%29&valnm=Lowood%2C+H.&history=yes>   
Stanford Univ., Stanford, CA, USA
This paper appears in: *Annals of the History of Computing, IEEE* 
</xpl/RecentIssue.jsp?punumber=85> 
Publication Date: July-Sept. 2009 
Volume: 31 , Issue: 3 </xpl/tocresult.jsp?isnumber=5223975> 
On page(s): 5 - 19 
ISSN: 1058-6180 
INSPEC Accession Number:10841666 
Digital Object Identifier: 10.1109/MAHC.2009.53 
Current Version Published: 2009-08-25

Abstract
The earliest digital games emerged out of laboratories and research 
centers in the 1960s and 1970s. The intertwined histories of Nolan 
Bushnell's Computer Space and Pong illustrate the transition from these 
"university games" to accessible entertainment and educational games as 
well as the complicated historical relationship among the arcade, 
computer, and videogames.


http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=5223982&isnumber=5223975 
<http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=5223982&isnumber=5223975>

Henry

Martin Goldberg wrote:

> Henry -

>

> On Wed, Jan 20, 2010 at 11:12 PM, Henry Lowood <lowood at stanford.edu> wrote:

>   

>> Hi Martin,

>>

>> This is great news.  A few years back, I set up a project here at Stanford

>> to see what the district court archives had.

>>     

>

> Wow, that must have been expensive.  Curt and I did the same thing to

> get to the bottom of the whole Atari Inc./Atari Corp./Amiga/Commodore

> mess and that was pretty costly to get everything from the California

> federal court records.  They were not very helpful, and it was

> basically "Copies are x a page, and we won't tell you how many

> documents there are.  You just send however much money you're willing

> to put up and we'll copy what that covers."

>

>   

>> We hired a guy to photocopy

>> materials for us, and indeed we received some interesting stuff (some of

>> which I used in my Pong article),

>>     

>

> Is there any way to see a copy of that article?

>

>   

>> but we learned that due to terms of the

>> settlement(s), a lot of the material was sealed.

>>     

>

> Yes, we had that issue as well with the Amiga thing.  But that's where

> alternative sourcing of documents, interviews, and the like come in.

> >From that process, we actually managed to track down other material

> that no one had any idea existed (such as many of the advanced

> research projects going on at Atari Inc. before the sale).  It's stuff

> like that which makes this field genuinely exciting for me.

>

>   

>>    If, after scanning, you

>> need an archival home for the papers or for the digitized copies, just let

>> me know.

>>     

>

> Thanks, we'll certainly keep that in mind.  Some of it's for the 3

> volume set Curt and I are working on, and the bulk will be for an

> online archive we're putting together.  Some will also be going to a

> law institute Ralph has an arrangement with.

>

> Just going through and getting a basic feel for the material and

> organizing it was a chore in itself while I was at Ralph's.  Some of

> the very interesting things to me (which are not to everyone else)

> were some of the original drafts of the patent filings of his,

> including exploratory documentation on other possibly related patents.

>  It was a pretty involved, thorough, and long process - very unlike

> the "Well Ralph was just good at filing patents" (i.e. nothing unique,

> he just got the paperwork done before anyone else) that Nolan like to

> brush it off as.

>

>   

>> Ralph was a huge help on the article, and I feel like I owe him.

>>

>>     

>

> He's a great guy, and simply amazingly spry for being 87.  He's still

> very active in design and his lab is just a mess of stuff he's working

> on every day.  That was the other part of the trip, we're working on

> bringing a few research/proto ideas of his to market.  Just an honor

> to work with him and gain a glimpse in to the many years of vast

> insight in research and design that he has.

>

>

> Marty

> _______________________________________________

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> game_preservation at igda.org

> http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/game_preservation

>   


-- 
Henry Lowood
Curator for History of Science & Technology Collections;
     Film & Media Collections
HRG, Green Library
557 Escondido Mall, Stanford University Libraries
Stanford CA 94305-6004 USA
http://www.stanford.edu/~lowood
lowood at stanford.edu; 650-723-4602

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