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processors</title></head><body>
<div><font color="#000000"><b>OLIVE: a system for emulating old OSes
on old processors that saves old data from extinction<br>
<br>
</b>Olive ("Open Library of Images for Virtualized
Execution") is an experimental service from Carnegie Mellon
University that stores images of old processors, as well as the old
operating systems that ran on top of them, along with software
packages for those old OSes; this allows users access old data from
obsolete systems inside simulations of the computers that originally
ran that data, using the original operating systems and
applications.</font><br>
<font color="#000000"></font></div>
<div><font color="#000000">This is a very powerful model for
maintaining access to old data formats; while modern apps are often
capable of parsing old data formats, they have well-understood
shortcomings. For example, buggy versions of old apps may have been
able to understand the corrupt files they created, but newer programs
may only parse the old data if it was written to "spec."
Attempts to overcome this with "bug-compatibility" and
"quirks modes" are imperfect substitutes for actually
running the old code, bugs and all.</font></div>
<div><font color="#000000"><br>
https://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/software/carnegie-mellon-is-savin<span
></span>g-old-software-from-oblivion<br>
<br>
<i>What else can Olive do? Maybe you're wondering what tools
businesses were using shortly after Intel introduced the Pentium
processor. Olive can help with that, too. Just fire up Microsoft
Office 4.3 from 1994 (which thankfully predates the annoying automated
office assistant "Clippy").</i></font><br>
<font color="#000000"><i></i></font></div>
<div><font color="#000000"><i>Perhaps you just want to spend a
nostalgic evening playing Doom for DOS-or trying to understand what
made such first-person shooter games so popular in the early 1990s. Or
maybe you need to redo your 1997 taxes and can't find the disk for
that year's version of TurboTax in your attic. Have no fear: Olive has
you covered.</i></font></div>
<div><font color="#000000"><i> </i></font></div>
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