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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?
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.
The links don't stop working if nobody is seeding.
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
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.
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
Hey! I never agreed to let you two in on my club!
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/
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.
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).
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
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.
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