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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."
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.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
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.
This tagline was transcoded to result in at least one smirk. If you experience failure to smirk, please consult your Gen
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/