Retro Workshop, Part 3 ---------------------- Back in the summer, I laid out my then tentative plan for teaching some sort of retro computing workshop to a group of 200 level Media Studies students, loosely based on an even more retro workshop I myself had attended a short time previously, an introduction to printing with movable type[1]. I gave the workshop to a (smallish) group of students earlier this month, and here is a brief description of how it went down. Before the workshop could even happen, there were one or two technical hurdles to leap over. A few years ago, when the Library managed our own computer labs, things would have been simpler: when I wanted some oddball software installed, I would have asked our lab manager to install it. Nowadays though, we live in a more complicated and sadly, more dangerous world. We all live in fear of ransomware and risk mitigation is the order of the day. Consequently, folks like myself are no longer trusted to make decisions about the relative safety of installable software; all such decisions must be referred to the University's InfoSec group, who to their credit are typically pretty reasonable about what they approve. Which, in this case, meant allowing DOSBox to run in the lab. But because DOSBox is an emulator, and once you install an emulator it's not possible to vet in advance the software that runs within it, additional precautions had to be taken. Notably ... a. DOSbox would be installed, not on the lab computers, but on a dedicated file share. (Probably the smallest file share created at the University in years. I asked for 100MB, far more than needed; they gave me 1G). Fortunately there is a version of DOSBox that runs off portable media[2], so no problem installing it that way. b. Access to the share would be strictly limited to the students enrolled in the workshop, plus the instructor. I still have some (increasingly limited) admin level permissions, so I was able to add and remove users from the appropriate AD group, which was handy for granting permissions for last-minute enrollees, of which there were a couple. c. DOSBox itself would only be granted applocker permissions the day of the workshop. When it gets this fiddly, one tends to anticipate spending half the class figuring out why the technology isn't working for anyone. But surprisingly, this arrangement worked pretty well. The only small hiccup was that students had to manually map the share to the lab computers, which took about 10 minutes or so for everyone to figure out. Prior to the class, I had configured DOSBox to boot directly into the software we were going to explore, an old videotex/NAPLPS drawing program called Microstar Graphics Editor (MGE)[3]. So that made things a bit easier for the students, most of whom, I am sure, had never worked at a command line before. I gave them a brief tutorial covering some of MGE's more notable peculiarities, necessary because MGE was created before the standard UI for drawing programs was fully established, and because NAPLPS graphics themselves have their quirks. Following which the students had around 40 minutes to create ... whatever graphic they could manage to create, working in an environment that must have seemed as archaic to them, as letterpress printing did to me. This was, after all, the first NAPLPS graphics workshop held at the university since 1984 ... The last half hour of the workshop was me doing a demo, essentially running the usual digital restoration process in reverse, from emulation back to real hardware. As the students were all working off the same fileshare, they were by default all saving their files to the same location. I used a 2007 Dell laptop (described in my recent ROOPHLOCH post) to connect to the DOSBox share, to retrieve the students' files and write them to a 3.5" floppy. Following which, I transferred their files to a circa 1990 386 PC I had earlier set up in the lab, running a NAPLPS display program, with which I quickly combined their files into a menued Videotex-like presentation. I think/hope there were a number of interesting takeaways around the evolution of hardware and software and the persistence of digital objects across time. Or at the very least, that the students had some fun. And I have to say, I was quite impressed with their work! After the workshop, and with their permission, I converted the presentation to a web emulation which if you're interested is viewable here: https://telidonart.ca/emu202410/ References ---------- 1. Previous phlog post gopher://sdf.org:70/0/users/jdd/phlog/20240707-workshop-2.txt 2. Portable DOSBox https://portableapps.com/apps/games/dosbox_portable 3. MGE http://cd.textfiles.com/simtel/simtel20/MSDOS/NAPLPS/.index.html There is a small amount of magic required to coax MGE to run under DOSBox, send me an email at jdd@sdf.org if you'd like to know the correct incantation.