OLIVE: a system for emulating old OSes on old processors that saves old data from extinction
(World News Science)

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. 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...