Preserving a Rembrandt requires controlled humidity, controlled light and a conservator. Preserving a 1994 CD-ROM requires all of that plus a working drive, a compatible operating system, a machine that will boot it, and someone who remembers what the software was supposed to do.
The Computer History Museum’s software collection runs to roughly 300,000 titles. Fewer than four per cent have been verified as running in an emulated environment.
The technical obstacles are surmountable and largely solved in principle. Disk images can be captured. Emulators exist for most historically significant platforms. The harder problem is that software is not a document. It is a behaviour, and a behaviour requires an environment — an operating system version, a display mode, a peripheral, sometimes a network service that was decommissioned in 2003.
Copyright makes the rest of it worse. Most commercially released software from the period remains under copyright, frequently held by entities that no longer exist in any traceable form. The Copyright Office has granted a narrow exemption for preservation, renewed every three years, which permits institutions to circumvent protection for archival purposes but not to make the results available remotely.
The practical consequence is that a researcher must travel to the collection to use it, which for a category of object that exists as pure information is close to absurd.
The people doing this work are aware that they are racing hardware. Optical media from the mid-nineties has a documented failure rate rising sharply past thirty years. The drives that read it are no longer manufactured.