Keeping stuff: How to preserve course papers despite technological change

MASS-11

In 1985, Computer Services licensed a commercial program called MASS-11 from the Microsystems Engineering Company (MEC) and began recommending it as the campus-wide word-processing solution. MASS-11 was a behemoth; it came on three five-inch floppies that had to be swapped in and out of the drives frequently while the program was running. It was also domineering. MEC's idea was that you would start up the computer for a session of word-processing and immediately enter the MASS-11 universe. By issuing commands to MASS-11, you could have it print or display a document, bring it up for editing, move it from one folder to another, and so on. When you were done, you would exit from the MASS-11 universe and shut off the computer. Problems would arise if you tried to do anything with your documents without going through MASS-11.

I refused to use MASS-11, partly because it was so hard to use, partly because it was useless for files containing computer program source code, and partly because I didn't want my documents held hostage. Many Grinnell computer users, however, were suckered into this deal, and later paid the price when the College moved on to more advanced document-management systems. Extracting files from MASS-11's grasp and translating them into documents that other word-processing software could deal with turned out to be ... ah ... non-trivial. (I'm using this word in the computer professionals' sense; I mean that it was either difficult, cumbersome, time-consuming, or impossible, depending on the exact contents of the documents.)

MASS-11 went through a long series of mutations and evolutions over the years. By the time I wrote the first version of this talk in 2001, it had ceased to be a document manager and become a somewhat clumsy tool for generating computer graphics. Happily, even this remake has now expired. One would have to search long and hard to find an extant machine that could provide access to documents in MASS-11 format.

Ironically, one of Microsystems' current specialties is helping customers convert documents from one Microsoft Word format to another and in cleaning up catastrophic messes that result from buggy and poorly designed word-processing software, confusion, carelessness, and inept automated conversions.