When Software was Sound: Exploring the forensic materiality and evidence of manufacture of microcomputer software recorded on cassette.
Michael Borthwick
The need to preserve microcomputer software as part of our shared digital heritage is now recognised. This work is being undertaken within academic and cultural institutions and also by the public. Some of this heritage exists on cassette tapes upon which data is encoded as sound. Current preservation practices implicitly privilege the preservation of the bytes encoded on the tape but not necessarily the original audio signal itself. This case study of Australian educational programs recovered from 40 year old cassettes suggests that their original signals contain evidence of an atypical mastering process and in doing so exemplify Kirschenbaum’s (2008) delineation between the forensic and formal materiality of digital objects. By extending this delineation, for the first time, to software on cassette this article attests to the ongoing theoretical value of Kirschenbaum’s thesis. It further suggests that cassette software preservation practices be aligned with those of physical object conservation in which an ethical responsibility to preserve ‘evidence of manufacture’ has long been acknowledged.
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