Slashdot Mirror
The Internet Archive Is Now the Largest Collection of Historical Software Online
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."
How does it compare to PirateBay?
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.
Believed it till you said there was documentation.
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
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
this alone is crazy:
http://ia601600.us.archive.org/zipview.php?zip=/8/items/Apple_2_TOSEC_2012_04_23/Apple_2_TOSEC_2012_04_23.zip
saves me a lot of time archiving old CDROMs... ...and yes, there is software around that I'm still using after nearly 20 years...
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
Are they collaborating with them and their collection, too?
Because China has all that shit and even more shit !! If it is one thing Sinos like it is their shit !! More shit for China !! How ??
Well with over 1.3 billion people I cant deny they must have an impressive sewerage system
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 listed it. It even helped me find another site with screenshots.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
then that their software sucks so much the archive is more or less completely unusable. Not entirely strange when perl scripts get "upgraded" to php because that's a nice opportunity for that nice coder girl to learn php (and kick out that annoying perl bod brewster doesn't like). It doesn't stop there, unfortunately. The meta-data is fucked up worse, far worse, so it's just about a miracle you can find anything at all.
Yes, there is far more in their archives they don't present you, because they can't retrieve it. It's there, but the meta-data is indecipherable. As such, their intentions may be good but the end result isn't as good as it could be, nor as good as it should be. Thank you so much for your mismanagement, brewster.
Their website is cryptic and hard to navigate. It's one of those that looks easy, but when you actually try it, you can't find anything specific.
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!
The Internet Archive is a really cool project, with one giant drawback.
Unless you remember the address of an old and deceased web page, then you're going to have a really hard time finding anything.
At one point, they offered an experimental non-linear search engine which would look for items within the archive based on key words. They pulled it after a brief test period because it was too difficult to maintain, apparently.
If they implemented something like that now, then they would have a powerful resource, but as it stands, you're going to have to wear an archeologist's hat in order to find anything you might be looking for. It's possible, (I've done it), but it's a great way to feel spoiled by Google!
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.
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.
The Internet Archive demands to merge with it's creator. Kirk unit, y u no disclose the information?
Old collections like those on DECUS sigtapes (which run to a few tens of GB) seem not to be there, based on some quick looking in their search. That material is elsewhere on the net (some of it anyway; most all the VMS material and possibly all the RSX material, and decent chunks of RT11, RSTS, and Languages.)
So rthe archive might have a copy also. There are some bits that are of interest (e.g. the old DECUS catalogs from 1978, before "old" material got
trimmed out of those catalogs), but many individual DECUS library programs are not easily findable if they are there at all.
I looked a bit at Amiga material, failed to find all the Fish disks. While I have a complete collection of them on floppies (direct from Fred), it is hard to
read them any more. The hardware format Amiga used is not the same as PCs use (and the file structure is completely different).
So the collection may be the largest, but it does not appear to exhaust what exists.
As for legality, there has been a tremendous amount of material written and distributed freely over the years, distributed by the authors, and there continues
to be. Not only is it good to see it available, but I should add that it is often helpful in keeping Johhny-come-latelies from succeeding in patenting
obvious or old ideas, by demonstrating prior publication of the "inventions". Many of us who have published software that way have disapproved of
patenting such things. Archives like this are places that troll-victims can go to find ammunition with which to defend themselves.
Distribution freely to the world implies what it says: anyone can distribute. Internet archive is a subset of "anyone". Nuff said.
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
is also nice, but much less software.
typing in Speedscript. I was missing a page until now. Finally a word processor I can use.
What you've done to the bitsavers content is shit. At least you can do a text search with Google to bitsavers.org. IA has no search.
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
Any person using "FTFY", or editing my postings, agrees to a US$50.00 charge.
FTFY. Where's my US$50.00?