ALLOWING EMULATOR TO OPEN MAC SOFTWARE

The central idea of the approach I describe here is to enable the emulation of obsolete systems on future, unknown systems, so that a digital documentвЂ™s original software can be run in the future despite being obsolete. This is the only reliable way to recreate a digital documentвЂ™s original functionality, look, and feel. In light of the foregoing analysis, I propose that the best (if not the only) way to satisfy the above criteria is to somehow run a digital documentвЂ™s original software. Finally, the only assumptions it should make about future computers are that they will be able to perform any computable function and (optionally) that they will be faster and/or cheaper to use than current computers. It should offer up-front acceptance testing at accession time, to demonstrate that a given document will be accessible in the future. It should provide single-step access to all documents, without requiring multiple layers of encapsulation to be stripped away to access older documents, while allowing the contents of a digital document to be extracted for conversion into the current vernacular, without losing the original form of the document.

The ideal approach should offer alternatives for levels of safety and quality, volume of storage, ease of access, and other attributes at varying costs, and it should allow these alternatives to be changed for a given document, type of document, or corpus at any time in the future. If translation is unavoidable (as when translating labeling information), the approach should guarantee that this translation will be reversible, so that the original form can be recovered without loss. It should retain as much as desired (and feasible) of the original functionality, look, and feel of each original document, while minimizing translation so as to minimize both labor and the potential for loss via corruption. It should facilitate document management (cataloging, deaccessioning, and so forth) by associating human-readable labeling information and metadata with each document. It should provide maximum leverage, in the sense that implementing it for any document type should make it usable for all document types. In contrast to the above strategies, an ideal approach should provide a single, extensible, long-term solution that can be designed once and for all and applied uniformly, automatically, and in synchrony (for example, at every future refresh cycle) to all types of documents and all media, with minimal human intervention.

Allowing emulator to open mac