December 9, 2008

agripPWNED

by Nick Montfort · , 4:29 pm

An elusive 3.5″ diskette of William Gibson’s Agrippa has finally been located, and video of a 1992-era Mac computer running it under System 7 is now available (along with the bit-for-bit image of the disk itself) on The Agrippa Files. The site is part of Alan Liu’s Transcriptions Project at UCSB, with this emulation prepared by Matt Kirschenbaum and Doug Reside of Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities with help from several others, including Robert Maxwell at the University of Maryland’s Digital Forensics Lab. New bootleg video footage of the Agrippa launch event – an hour’s worth – is also now online. Many, many details of the process of recovering and presenting this important piece of imaginative, poetic software are available in the article “No Round Trip: Two New Primary Sources for Agrippa.”

5 Responses to “agripPWNED”


  1. Matt K. Says:

    Thanks Nick! Just to be clear, the “video” of the 1992-era Mac is actually video capture of an emulation using one of the disk images we spawned from the original floppy. (You also get to see the poem run in the “bootleg” footage we posted from the original launch, but it’s not real legible there.) Today, December 9th, is the 16th anniversary of that launch.

  2. Nick Montfort Says:

    Yes, I guess the first video would be more of a “screencast” – but that suggests that you have someone talking over the moving image, and you have the original sounds instead. It’s a screen capture motion picutre, I guess. I wasn’t sure about what to call it. It is not, anyway, video in the sense of Jed’s Other Poem (Beautiful Ground). Thanks for your work on this great project, Matt.

  3. Nick Montfort Says:

    Boing, slash, splat. (But the site will be back up soon…)

  4. Deena Larsen Says:

    If we could get a copy of that disk to Matt, he could run it on the 1992 Macs at MITH…

  5. Matt K. Says:

    We tried.

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