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."

Comments

PirateBay

[BlackPignouf]

How does it compare to PirateBay?

Re:PirateBay

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:PirateBay

[CastrTroy]

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 hour to download a megabyte, and would constant get disconnected).

"and websites"

[xushi]

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.

Re:"and websites"

[djsmiley]

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.

Re:"and websites"

[djsmiley]

Hmmmm - well I help out with ArchiveTeam, we grab some of the sites which go in.

Anyway.... as far as I understand is that the IA have a special licence/cause/getout agreement which lets them do this as a charity. Of course if CP or other illegal items were found, they are blacked out - they still are archived but aren't accessable by the public (I don't know exactly what happens to CP, but other stuff just goes away). The same for other works which companies request blacking out. Apparently this happens with _a lot_ of nintendo materials, and with a 100 year history you can imagine this is a large selection of material.

Re:"and websites"

[wylf]

Ever heard of a library? They have special rights also.

Special rights afforded by your Copyright Act (or equivalent). IA have no such (direct) provision.

afaik, IA are covered on the basis all archived material is publicly accessible, coupled with a straightforward removal process for copyright holders.

Re:"and websites"

[Registered Coward v2]

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.

Re:"and websites"

[jovius]

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.

Re:"and websites"

[Gaygirlie]

Alas, that is not how it works. IA clearly downloads the material to their servers and shares the content from there to other peers -- something quite a few websites have been brought down for by MAFIAA and friends.

Re:"and websites"

[RobertLTux]

a couple things are in play

1 IA is a part of the LOC
2 if you really as a copyright holder want to have your stuff dropped out all you have to do is put a robots.txt in place and then they drop you from the archive.

http://faq.web.archive.org/how-can-i-have-my-site-removed-from-the-wayback-machine/

Re:"and websites"

[Tastecicles]

copyright doesn't protect authors, it protects publishers.

Re:"and websites"

[Netssansfrontieres]

"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"

[datapharmer]

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"

[magic maverick]

"1 IA is not a part of the LOC"
FTFY

If for some reason you think they are, maybe you should provide some documentation. The IA does work with the LoC, and also other national libraries, but are an independent organization.

Re:"and websites"

[Culture20]

with a 100 year history you can imagine this is a large selection of material.

What year are you from, and can I borrow your time machine? I promise not to screw with history too much.

Re:"and websites"

[jeffmeden]

with a 100 year history you can imagine this is a large selection of material.

What year are you from, and can I borrow your time machine? I promise not to screw with history too much.

He meant that Nintendo has a 100 year history, which as a company it does (actually 124 years, it was founded in 1889). Certainly not 100 years worth of internet content, but 100+ years worth of historical information, any amount of which could have been committed to the 'tubes.

Re:"and websites"

[thetoadwarrior]

If copyright holders don't like it they can setup their robots file correctly or go cry about it.

Re:"and websites"

[djsmiley]

Most fiction doesn't tell you the genocide was "ok".

The bible does.

Your move.

Re:"and websites"

[Anonymous Coward]

Some of the best books I've ever read were freely available on the internet. It works great for the distribution mechanism, not so much for the generated artificial scarcity for massive profits and power to censor angle.

Re:"and websites"

[Tastecicles]

...who is invariably NOT THE AUTHOR.

Bit late for an April fool.

[Anonymous Coward]

Believed it till you said there was documentation.

Re:Bit late for an April fool.

[webmistressrachel]

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.

[Anonymous Coward]

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:Bit late for an April fool.

[Inda]

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

Re:Bit late for an April fool.

[webmistressrachel]

This is extremely informative, thank you, and sorry for not digging hard enough!

Is there an age when software is considered...

[ron-l-j]

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?

Re:Is there an age when software is considered...

[Anonymous Coward]

There is. It's 70 years after the authors death or 95 years if the work was created as work for hire. Just like everything else.

And yes, it's bat shit crazy. Richard Stallman has posted a view of the subject in http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/pirate-party.html

Re:Is there an age when software is considered...

[Gaygirlie]

Hey! I never agreed to let you two in on my club!

Quit handy sometimes for old free apps

[WillAdams]

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

Re:Quit handy sometimes for old free apps

[Tastecicles]

FractINT (I use version 18, the last major update was 20)
FlashGet (formerly JetCar, used to be free as in beer, now nagware - I use the old version)
Satori PhotoXL 2.2 with NetObjects Fusion 2 - good tools for building rolling slideshows with photos
SonicStage CP (versions prior to 4.3 are always good, 4.3 and later kind of didn't work in XP and I NEED this for my Minidisc gear!)
First Page 2000 - WYSIWYG site building tool, outputs in html, php, js, vba...

Serif Movieplus 4
Games: 7th Guest, Simon the Sorcerer, USS Ticonderoga, Warbirds, GTA, Worms, Homeworld Cataclysm, Red Alert, Angel Devoid, Crimson Skies, Air Warrior III, Tomb Raider Chronicles, F22 DID, Dark Reign, Tachyon: The Fringe...

I have original CD media for all this software and most of it won't run on current platforms, so I have to run it on a virtual machine.

Re:Quit handy sometimes for old free apps

[WillAdams]

Corel Grafigo: http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.corel.com/6763/downloads/grafigo/CorelGrafigo.exe (it's hard to install on some new systems for some reason)
NCPlot 1.1: http://web.archive.org/web/20080514043350/http://www.ncplot.com/ncplotfree/NCPlot%20v1.1%20Setup.exe (1.2 should be at http://web.archive.org/web/20080514043350/http://www.ncplot.com/ncplotfree/NCPlot_v120.exe but isn't)

sweet

[Tastecicles]

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

Re:sweet

[antdude]

Just curious. Which software?

Re:sweet

[Tastecicles]

FractINT, for one. It's a fractal engine.

Re:sweet

[antdude]

Ah. Aren't there newer versions/others?

Re:sweet

[Tastecicles]

the latest version I use is from about 1992 (version 18.21), the latest bugfix release (20.something) is from 2012, a patch on the major release from 2008(?)

Re:IE LARGEST COLLECTION OF CRAP OUTSIDE OF CHINA

[Chrisq]

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

Abuse

[Jason Levine]

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.

Re:Abuse

[Tanath]

Protip: If you can't find what you're looking for directly, look for a site that will have it or link to it.

What About the Source Code?

[organgtool]

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!

Re:What About the Source Code?

[organgtool]

I never said that they should be forced to disclose their source. My point was that if they choose not to disclose the source, then the source code should be treated as a trade secret and receive absolutely no copyright protection. That means that the company would have protection on their code indefinitely assuming they were capable of preventing a leak. But in the event of a leak, they would have little recourse. If they choose to release the source code instead, then the code should receive full copyright protection. However, what we have today is a system that rewards companies with copyright protection on their source code without getting the benefit of actually EVER seeing that source code. This violates the intent of intellectual property laws which is to have the creators release their work in exchange for a government-granted, time-limited monopoly. Right now, the companies are getting the benefit of the monopoly without ever having to disclose the actual intellectual property and that's just wrong.

10 GB/mo cap

[tepples]

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.

Turbo Gameworks

[figleaf]

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

[joeflies]

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