Photo gallery: Curator Claire Fox provides tour through new library exhibit “Remembering ‘Amnesia’”
October 7, 2024
Claire Fox, software preservation and emulation librarian at Yale Library, introduced a large gathering of visitors to her exhibit, “Remembering ‘Amnesia’: Rebooting the First Computerized Novel,” on view in the Hanke Gallery in Sterling Memorial Library through March 2.
The exhibit tells the story of “Amnesia,” the first computerized novel, created by science fiction author and poet Thomas M. Disch. It also tells the story of the collaborative and creative efforts of Fox and many colleagues to preserve the video game and make a playable version available to 21st-century players.
The game was initially designed to run on now obsolete computers. Fox and her team worked with the Emulation-as-a-Service Infrastructure program (EaaSI, pronounced “easy”) to provide an approximation of the early game as it was experienced by players in 1986, the year it was published.
Visitors to the exhibit—including Barbara Rockenbach, Stephen F. Gates ’68 University Librarian—tried out the game on monitors set up in the nave of Sterling (there are two in Sterling and another in Bass library). All three stations display instructions and tips to guide players more familiar with the language of our own everyday computing experiences.
On display are Disch’s handwritten notebooks and typewritten manuscripts, alongside computer printous, floppy disks, and Disch’s first computer, the Kaypro II. Also on view are the original packaging and contents of the early releases of the game, which were published by Electronic Arts and Harper & Row.
