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Software

The Internet Archive Is Now the Largest Collection of Historical Software Online 94

Posted by samzenpus from the biggest-there-is dept.
hypnosec writes "The Internet Archive has a great collection of books, music, visual items and websites but, it had one thing lacking up until now – software. This has changed recently as The Internet Archive now claims to hold the largest collection of software in the world. The expansion at the Internet Archive has come through collaboration with other independent archives like the Disk Drives collection, the FTP site boneyard, Shareware CD Archive, and the TOSEC archive. The archive doesn't hold just the software – it also holds documentation as well."
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The Internet Archive Is Now the Largest Collection of Historical Software Online More

The Internet Archive Is Now the Largest Collection of Historical Software Online

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  • PirateBay (Score:2, Redundant)

    by BlackPignouf ( 1017012 )

    How does it compare to PirateBay?

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      The links don't stop working if nobody is seeding.

      • Actually, There is only 1 seeder. And if that seeder stops, it's all over. Bit-torrent is probably a better method of keeping certain things active than the Internet Archive. At least for things that people are about. I think it's noble that there's some organization willing to try to maintain an archive of everything, but I somehow I question the usefulness of keeping old copies of GetRight download manager lying around (Even though I may have loved it when I had a dial-up connection that would take an ho

  • "and websites" (Score:4, Interesting)

    by xushi ( 740195 ) on Monday April 15, 2013 @04:13AM (#43450387)

    Out of curiosity, how is this even legal?

    legally should/would they be held liable if one of those millions of sites has illegal content, like say child pornography or pedophilia? Or can any user use `mass archiving` as an excuse should they ever get caught with any illegal porn, copyrighted material, et al..

    Or what if they archived a copyrighted site without asking the owners for permission, such as a personal site, or one of those news sites that keep complaining about others who link to them - or even those persons who link to them...

    There are many more examples, but it looks like this should cause more issues rather than good use.

    • Apart from the oddities such as CP, which laws exactly is copying a website breaking?

      Everything presented by the wayback machine - which is how the websites are presented are clearly marked as archives and not live sites.

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by jovius ( 974690 )

          Consider for example 10 freely usable computers in a public space. Now open the same website yearly in each of the computers and leave the session open. Random visitor can then have a glance of 10 years of a website's history, and the action is approved by the content holders.

        • Actually they are pretty good about following copyright owner's wishes. They follow robots.txt and even remove past content from public view if you add them to robots.txt. They have always been happy to remove anything my clients have asked them to (and we've had to unfortunately request removal of a few things for legal reasons - due to 3rd parties threatening our clients in the publishing industry, public safety, etc)

    • Re:"and websites" (Score:5, Informative)

      by Registered Coward v2 ( 447531 ) on Monday April 15, 2013 @06:23AM (#43450785)

      Out of curiosity, how is this even legal?

      The Librarian of Congress granted a DMCA exemption for collections of obselete computer software archived for purposes of preservation. Not sure if it would apply to scanned manuals and documentation.

    • Out of curiosity, how is this even legal?

      legally should/would they be held liable if one of those millions of sites has illegal content, ...
      Or what if they archived a copyrighted site without asking the owners for permission, such as a personal site, or one of those news sites that keep complaining about others who link to them - or even those persons who link to them...

      There are many more examples, but it looks like this should cause more issues rather than good use.

      I agree. We should abolish Copyrights. They are very problematic non-rights that benefit no one, really.

    • "How is this even legal?"
      Because the Internet Archive received a waiver from the DMCA for the purposes of archiving software that is no longer commercially available.

    • Re:"and websites" (Score:4, Insightful)

      by thetoadwarrior ( 1268702 ) on Monday April 15, 2013 @10:57AM (#43452717) Homepage
      If copyright holders don't like it they can setup their robots file correctly or go cry about it.

  • Bit late for an April fool. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Believed it till you said there was documentation.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by webmistressrachel ( 903577 )

      I thought that this comment was sarcasm until I looked into the "Shareware CD-ROM archive". For the Computer Gaming World stuff, there's no way to even get an IDEA of what MIGHT be on each disc without actually downloading the 600MB+ ISO's in blind faith and hoping for the best.

      All the "metadata" just points to more "metadata", which points to the previously mentioned "metadata". All in XML, just to add to the annoyance.

      • Re:Bit late for an April fool. (Score:5, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 15, 2013 @07:45AM (#43451109)

        You can browse the contents (and directly download!) from within the ISO by appending a slash to the end of the download filename. This works with ISOs, ZIPs, and TARs.

        http://archive.org/download/Computer_Gaming_World_Extra_October_1995/Computer_Gaming_World_Extra_October_1995.iso/

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Inda ( 580031 )
        600mb is a 48 second download, for some of us.

        I'm not bragging. I understand most people don't get my download speeds but the point is the same: 600mb isn't a lot these days.

        There's another post in this thread where some games are mentioned. I remember downloading those games back in the day too. 65 x 1.44mb = 94mb, and that set of files had the game minus the videos and the audio was compressed flat. 94mb would have taken me about 4 hours to download and yet I still did it. I did it a lot.

        Just imagine it's

        • 600mb isn't a lot these days.

          If you happen to be stuck on satellite or microwave for your home ISP, it's 6 percent of your 10 GB/mo cap.

          Just imagine it's your birthday and you're unwrapping the present, and it's going to take 4 hours, but the wait could be worth it.

          And you have to make up for it by not doing anything else with your Internet for 1.8 days.

  • Public domain? I understand that software that is released under license contains residual rights. But in the speed of application development, and version changes, should there be a public domain age placed on software or web pages?

  • Needed install files for the following and got them from The Wayback Machine:

      - Corel Grafigo 1 (v2 and later aren't free like v1) --- useful sketching tool
      - NCPlot 1.1 (v2 and later aren't free like v1.2 and earlier) --- primitive G-code editor but much faster than NC Corrector

    a couple of others which I can't recall --- anyone else got a list of forgotten treasures?

    William

  • saves me a lot of time archiving old CDROMs... ...and yes, there is software around that I'm still using after nearly 20 years...

  • Abuse (Score:3)

    by Jason Levine ( 196982 ) on Monday April 15, 2013 @07:50AM (#43451149) Homepage

    Thanks to this, I finally found a text-based game that I remember as a kid, but nobody else seemed to recall. It was a "game" called Abuse. You typed in insults to the computer and it insulted you back. I couldn't track it down (the term "abuse" is just too vague), but this Internet Archive link [archive.org] listed it. It even helped me find another site [atari8.info] with screenshots.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Tanath ( 2639157 )
      Protip: If you can't find what you're looking for directly, look for a site that will have it or link to it.
  • So they are currently archiving the binaries, but what about the source code? Oh, that's right - companies get copyright protection on source code AND they get to treat the source code as a trade secret. How convenient for them!

  • Searched for Turbo Gameworks and only thing it came up was a scanned pdf. No disk images. I had it but my parents threw it away with other junk. Would love to have it back.

  • I think the Magazine section is facinating (Score:3)

    by joeflies ( 529536 ) on Monday April 15, 2013 @11:29AM (#43453025)

    I don't know of any other place to get most of these nowadays. Lots of memories and magazines that I miss

    http://archive.org/details/computermagazines [archive.org]

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