CD-ROMs aren't dead (...not even zombies)

this short presentation aims to remind us that the preservation of technological artefacts could be found not only in heritage initiatives and institutional policies, but also in the common user practices not driven by the heritagization fever.

CD-ROM was one of the means of transition from analog to digital in the 1980s and 1990s. Since the Internet, mobile devices and platforms are considered the essence of the digital, it is usually treated a dead technology (and some even wonder if it needs to be revived). Yet the CD-ROM is not dead, and not even a zombie.

Indeed, it has been the object of constant preservation gestures (copying, backuping, etc.), especially once the CD burning technologies became available to a large audience in the late nineties. Most of these operations were considered as piracy. The products of these gestures are emulators, crowdsourced collections of CD-ROM images and technical documentation and, 30 years on, we say that they have, in fact, involuntary laid the foundation for further heritagization efforts.