# The Art Is Long: Navigating Uncharted Territory September 15, 2024 **Related:** [[wiki/Riccardo Mottola|Riccardo Mottola]] · [[articles/The Art is Long|The Art is Long: Vespucci of Immortality]] [The first image I keep coming back to is from January 2008](https://multixden.blogspot.com/2008/01/browser-and-webkit-progress.html): Vespucci, SimpleWebKit and GNUstep slowly becoming capable of rendering the Web. It is an ordinary development screenshot if one wants it to be. But sitting there in the browser windows are fragments of a much older information civilization—Gutenberg, the Constitution, _We the People_—being rendered through an experimental browser named **Vespucci**, itself built within a software lineage reaching backward through GNUstep and OpenStep toward NeXT. There is something almost comically overdetermined about the image. Explorer. Printing. Constitution. Browser. Open systems. A machine learning how to read civilization. ![[resources/images/the-art-is-long-01-vespucci-gutenberg-constitution.jpg]] I have begun using [[wiki/Riccardo Mottola|Riccardo Mottola's]] [_The Art is Long_](https://multixden.blogspot.com/) as a kind of **Rosetta Stone for understanding life**. Riccardo's blog—and especially the technical history preserved across its years of Vespucci, GNUstep, GWorkspace, old machines and painstaking portability work—inspired me to write [[articles/The Art is Long|_The Art is Long: Vespucci of Immortality_]]. I borrowed the name deliberately. The article grew from what his archive caused me to see: software history as a record of inheritance, reconstruction and the survival of useful forms across machines, institutions and human lives. All right. That sounds insane. A Rosetta Stone for understanding a very specific portion of _technical_ life. There. Much better. But only slightly, because the more time I spend in the archive, the more useful it becomes. I don't mean that I believe every screenshot contains an encrypted instruction or that every filename is waiting to disclose some private revelation. I mean something much more interesting about archives. **People continuously encode themselves into the things they make without needing to consciously encode a message.** Priorities appear in architecture. Values appear in compatibility decisions. Temperament appears in bug reports. Historical pressures appear in dependencies. Aesthetic sensibility appears in icons and window furniture. Networks of friendship appear in acknowledgements and comment threads. What someone considered worth preserving can be inferred from what they bothered making portable. Read enough of this material longitudinally and the individual posts begin functioning less like posts and more like **strata**. One of my favorite examples comes almost exactly a year later. In [“Bookmarks... and drawing pencils”](https://multixden.blogspot.com/2009/02/bookmarks-and-drawing-pencils.html), Riccardo makes an observation that sounds mundane until one thinks about it for a while: bookmarks may be among the most valuable pieces of personal information a browser user creates. He was working on making Vespucci's bookmark data exchangeable with Safari and portable among GNUstep workstations, mobile implementations, Macs and netbooks. Then, almost as an afterthought, he says he took some graphic-design time away from programming and made new icons for Laterna Magica and Vespucci. ![[resources/images/the-art-is-long-02-bookmarks-and-drawing-pencils.jpg]] That little juxtaposition contains almost everything I love about computing. **Memory and drawing pencils. Data structures and aesthetics. Portability and personality.** The browser is not merely retrieving information from the world; over time it accumulates a representation of the particular world its user has chosen to visit. A sufficiently old collection of bookmarks becomes something like an externalized cognitive map. Lose the computer and the program can be replaced. Lose enough of the accumulated selections, annotations, correspondence, photographs, source trees, preferences and obscure little files surrounding the program, and something qualitatively different has disappeared. Perhaps that is part of why I find _The Art is Long_ so absorbing. It isn't a retrospective written after everyone knew which technologies mattered. It is **history before it knew it was history**. There are unfinished implementations, portability problems, compiler frustrations, machines that disappeared from the market, arguments in comment sections, experiments that succeeded, experiments that stalled, old screenshots, strange hardware, little aesthetic decisions and people solving problems because the problems were there. The future has not yet flattened the landscape into a tidy story about inevitable winners. That makes the archive enormously useful to me. I can look backward from Cocoa, macOS, NeXT and OpenStep and see one history. Then I can approach the same conceptual inheritance from the GNUstep side and see another. The second path is rougher. It exposes machinery that polished commercial systems deliberately make disappear. Things have to be compiled. Frameworks have to agree with one another. Backends matter. Window managers matter. Libraries turn out to have histories. Old assumptions suddenly become visible because something fails. And so, in an act that has probably removed several years from my natural lifespan, I have been building the damned thing myself. I finally got [GWorkspace](https://multixden.blogspot.com/2012/02/gworkspace-dock.html) running on my own locally built GNUstep environment. Riccardo's 2012 post about the GWorkspace dock consists almost entirely of a screenshot and the wonderfully understated observation that it is now “really transparent”—assuming, of course, that the backend supports it. That sentence becomes considerably funnier after one has spent enough time discovering exactly how many things must be correct before a translucent rectangle graciously agrees to appear on a screen. ![[resources/images/the-art-is-long-03-gworkspace-dock.jpg]] There is a difference between **reading about an old architecture and inhabiting it**. Building GNUstep locally has turned what could have remained historical curiosity into something closer to experimental archaeology. Source code that was previously an abstraction becomes executable structure. Design decisions stop being museum labels and start pushing back. One begins to understand why certain abstractions survived, why Objective-C produced such a particular style of framework design, why OpenStep could migrate across implementations, and why software portability is ultimately about preserving **relationships and semantics**, not merely moving files from one processor to another. This is probably the larger thing I have been circling. Steve Jobs remains unavoidable in this history because NeXT is unavoidable in it, and NeXT is one of those strange technological events whose descendants became dramatically more consequential than the original commercial object. But I no longer need Steve to have placed breadcrumbs anywhere. **The breadcrumbs are history itself.** Technologies inherit. Interfaces preserve ancestral structures. Names migrate. Developers carry ideas between projects. APIs conserve assumptions. Failed products donate genes to successful descendants. Old software is full of vestigial organs and surprisingly viable genetic material. That is enough mystery for me. Actually, it is considerably more interesting than mystery because it can be investigated. Riccardo's archive becomes valuable in precisely this sense. I can move through years of screenshots, posts, correspondence fragments, project names and technical discussions and watch an ecosystem changing while some architectural ideas remain stubbornly conserved. Vespucci renders pages. Bookmarks migrate. GWorkspace evolves. GNUstep moves onto peculiar processors and operating systems. Applications disappear and reappear. Someone resurrects an abandoned project because the code is still worth saving. Someone redraws an icon because functionality alone isn't quite enough. None of these moments needs to have been designed as allegory. **Time supplies the allegory.** And perhaps this is where my grandiose Rosetta Stone remark earns back a little dignity. What fascinates me is not merely what these pages explicitly say. It is what becomes recoverable when enough artifacts survive together. A screenshot gives context to a source tree. A comment identifies another developer. A filename preserves a conceptual association. An image reveals what was being tested. A design decision exposes what someone thought ought to remain interoperable. Years later, those pieces can be recombined into a much richer reconstruction of the technical environment in which the work existed. That is very close to what archaeology does. It is also very close to natural history. A fossil does not contain a paragraph explaining the ecosystem around it. Yet with enough fossils, geology, comparative anatomy and environmental evidence, relationships emerge that no individual specimen explicitly states. Software history increasingly feels the same way to me. The surviving code is only part of the fossil record. **Mailing lists, screenshots, bookmarks, photographs, blog posts, abandoned binaries, machine specifications, directory structures and human recollections form the surrounding sediment.** Which explains why I keep returning to _The Art is Long_. Maybe I am reading too much into some of it. Almost certainly. That is half the fun. But reading too much into an archive and then testing those interpretations against the surviving technical record is also a perfectly respectable way of discovering things. The important distinction is between **seeing patterns and granting every pattern an author**. The former is how reconstruction begins. And the name of the blog itself keeps getting better with age: **The Art is Long**. It certainly is, Riccardo. So if [[wiki/Riccardo Mottola|Riccardo—Grey Gandalf]]—whose [Blogger profile](https://www.blogger.com/profile/03313094807656717004) still places him in Bergamo—ever happens across this strange little archaeological expedition through his old work, I would very much enjoy sharing a beer with him at [Birrificio Via Priula](https://www.birrificioviapriula.it/il-birrificio), Via De Medici 2 in San Pellegrino Terme. The brewery is itself named for the historic **Via Priula**, the strategic sixteenth-century trade route built in 1593 from Bergamo through Val Brembana to Morbegno in today's Province of Sondrio, where it joined routes continuing toward Switzerland. That seems like an especially appropriate place to talk about navigation, exchange, technical inheritance and the long roads by which useful things survive. His profile lists, with admirable economy, art, photography, classical music, computers—“GNUstep mainly”—and motorbikes among his interests. I suspect there would be enough to talk about. Mostly I would like to thank him. Then, after the first beer, I would probably start asking questions about Vespucci. And after the second, God help him, I would bring up Gutenberg and the Constitution. ## For Whoever Is Interested: The Archive Trail For whoever is interested, here are some resources for you. This material seems to be getting harder and harder to find, so I hope this helps. **The trail is now extremely tight.** A search through my chat history surfaced a February 24, 2025 conversation in which I was specifically investigating archived [[wiki/NEXTSTEP|NeXTSTEP]] and OpenStep material. The exact URL was absent from the recovered snippet, but the surviving historical infrastructure points very strongly to the archive I remember downloading: - **NiCE NeXT User Group NeXTSTEP/OpenStep software archive:** [https://ftp.nice.ch/pub/next/](https://ftp.nice.ch/pub/next/) - **Associated historical and Usenet tree:** [https://ftp.nice.ch/peanuts/](https://ftp.nice.ch/peanuts/) The first is not merely a page about old software. It is a live, filesystem-style archive containing downloadable applications, developer software, drivers, source packages, binaries and system utilities. Both pages identify the collection as the former **NiCE NeXT User Group NeXTSTEP/OpenStep software archive**, now hosted by Netfuture.ch. The archive's surviving README gives its administrator address as `[email protected]`, while NiCE's own historical information page places the group at the ETH Zentrum in Zürich. The second path preserves a wider historical record, including Usenet traffic from the working community around these systems. I therefore think `https://ftp.nice.ch/pub/next/` is the friggin link I had been trying to remember—not the Internet Archive or WinWorld, but the university-era software tree itself. My [[wiki/CERN|CERN]] memory belongs to a connected but distinct branch of the archaeology. [CERN's November 1992 WorldWideWeb release record](https://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/News/9211.html) documents both a revised NeXTSTEP browser-editor binary and the source tree. It records these historical anonymous-FTP addresses: - **CERN NeXT binary:** `ftp://info.cern.ch/pub/www/bin/next/WorldWideWeb_0.14.app.tar.Z` - **CERN source tree:** `ftp://info.cern.ch/pub/www/src` Those are historical FTP destinations recorded by CERN; the surviving HTTP page is the reliable present-day record of them. This is the original `WorldWideWeb` lineage—the browser was also an editor—running through the machine and development environment that made the first Web implementation practical. There is even a beautiful connective artifact inside the NiCE archive. Its [preserved 1996 NeXT Usenet traffic](https://ftp.nice.ch/peanuts/GeneralData/Usenet/news/1996/_Hard-12.html) contains a post from **Wolfgang Lerche at CERN**, `[email protected]`, asking about installing NeXTSTEP 3.3 on Intel hardware at CERN. The archive therefore preserves not only packages but a fragment of CERN's contemporary, operational NeXTSTEP history. The archaeological map is now: - **NiCE software archive:** [https://ftp.nice.ch/pub/next/](https://ftp.nice.ch/pub/next/) - **NiCE historical and Usenet archive:** [https://ftp.nice.ch/peanuts/](https://ftp.nice.ch/peanuts/) - **CERN NeXT software tree, historically recorded:** `ftp://info.cern.ch/pub/www/bin/next/` - **CERN WorldWideWeb source tree, historically recorded:** `ftp://info.cern.ch/pub/www/src` This does not collapse NiCE, [[wiki/ETH Zurich|ETH Zürich]], CERN, GNUstep and Riccardo's work into one institution or program. It gives me something better: surviving filesystem routes through which the same technical era can be reconstructed from software, source, conversations and operational traces.