Jason Scott of Textfiles.com Wants Your AOL & Shovelware CDs

eldavojohn writes: You've probably got a spindle in your closet, or a drawer layered with them: the CD-ROM discs that were mailed to you or delivered with some hardware that you put away "just in case." Now, of course, the case for actually using them is laughable. Well, a certain eccentric individual named Jason Scott has a fever — and the only cure is more AOL CDs. But his sickness doesn't stop there, "I also want all the CD-ROMs made by Walnut Creek CD-ROM. I want every shovelware disc that came out in the entire breadth of the CD-ROM era. I want every shareware floppy, while we're talking. I want it all. The CD-ROM era is basically finite at this point. It's over. The time when we're going to use physical media as the primary transport for most data is done done done. Sure, there's going to be distributions and use of CD-ROMs for some time to come, but the time when it all came that way and when it was in most cases the only method of distribution in the history books, now. And there were a specific amount of CD-ROMs made. There are directories and listings of many that were manufactured. I want to find those. I want to image them, and I want to put them up. I'm looking for stacks of CD-ROMs now. Stacks and stacks. AOL CDs and driver CDs and Shareware CDs and even hand-burned CDs of stuff you downloaded way back when. This is the time to strike." Who knows? His madness may end up being appreciated by younger generations!

Comments

I see the master plan

[SuperKendall]

and even hand-burned CDs of stuff you downloaded way back when

Just casually tossed out at the end there... when in fact that was the primary goal.

He wants to build the largest collection of 80's Mix CD's EVER ASSEMBLED, probably for some kind of evil sonic weapon.

Well sir, you will have my CD's and my wishes for luck in whatever scheme you have hatched, I ask only that you spare me or at least email me beforehand when to put on earmuffs.

Re:I see the master plan

[Anonymous Coward]

and even hand-burned CDs of stuff you downloaded way back when

Just casually tossed out at the end there... when in fact that was the primary goal.

He wants to build the largest collection of 80's Mix CD's EVER ASSEMBLED, probably for some kind of evil sonic weapon.

Well sir, you will have my CD's and my wishes for luck in whatever scheme you have hatched, I ask only that you spare me or at least email me beforehand when to put on earmuffs.

Yeah with that and... There are directories and listings of many that were manufactured. I want to find those. I want to image them, and I want to put them up. I'm looking for stacks of CD-ROMs now. Stacks and stacks. AOL CDs and driver CDs and Shareware CDs and even hand-burned CDs of stuff you downloaded way back when. This is the time to strike." from the summary... I hope he's obtained high quality legal advice about the copyright implications of actually doing this. Copyright lasts so much longer than the age of any AOL-era CD.

One of the many solid reasons why copyright needs to be curtailed. The original concept is solid, as was its time frame of twelve years. We can distribute more works more quickly at a drastically lower cost now. The original twelve year term, from an era during which a printing press was cutting-edge information technology, would be generous now. That would also be less corporation-friendly, hence the difficulty of its implementation.

Re:I see the master plan

[ArmoredDragon]

Shareware can typically be redistributed, and in most cases the author specifically put language in saying that they even encourage you to do so. In fact if somebody ever took it to court, I think there's sufficient evidence that stamping the shareware label on anything means that anybody in the world is given a blanket license to distribute it as much as they want.

I actually used to have one of those Walnut Creek CDs that I bought from a software store in a mall. It was called Doom Fever, and had a crapload of stuff on it that was fun for me at the time because even though I had a 14.4kbps modem that I bought with my allowance, my parents refused to ever pay for internet access because they were afraid that just the mere act of getting online means that its easy for somebody to steal your identity and ruin your life (they watched the movie The Net and basically assumed that that kind of thing happens to people all the time the second they dial in with their modem.)

I did use my modem to play Warcraft 2 and Doom multiplayer with friends down the street a lot though.

Re:I see the master plan

[Anonymous Coward]

the shareware label on anything means that anybody in the world is given a blanket license to distribute it as much as they want

Usually only if it was distributed for free, some allowed for a small fee to help cover the cost of the media and shipping.

Re: I see the master plan

[Anonymous Coward]

Legal advice? This guy had been sued for billions of dollars before. He's still around so I guess he won. Does that mean he gets to keep the imaginary dollars?

Re:I see the master plan

[gl4ss]

mostly it's not a problem.
but he's been sued before I think.

also, this is not a new project.. I think I saw a speech from him about this like a year ago+ already.

why it's mostly not a problem? the shareware stuff etc is licensed for shared like that. HOWEVER many of the shovelware cd collections sometimes has.. eh.. let's say, less than authorized stuff. I remember one shareware cd having a full version of exterminator(with warez group crack intro and all) for example. probably went in there by a mistake but anyways..

Re:I see the master plan

[hairyfeet]

Afraid not, a friend of my and myself actually tried contacting some of the old shareware companies to get permission to make the old shareware on a flash stick with a preconfigured DOSBox so kids could see what it was like in the early 90s.

What we found was 1.- A third of them are now owned by vultures that think some DOS card game should command the same prices as Doom 3 did at release, 2.- The rights are in limbo, because the companies have been split up and nobody knows who owned what (but nobody will give permission for fear somebody else might make a penny) and 3.- Companies that say "Oh we are gonna do something with that someday somewhere" and never do.

This is why I think copyrights should be a "use it or lose it" situation, where if a company does not sell their product in retail markets for x number of years they lose the rights which then go into public domain. This would also apply if they refuse to update the software so it can run on a modern system, otherwise they would just open a storefront on Amazon with a handful of discs for Windows 95 and try to argue "its for sale". Because as it is now more and more games are being lost, and with the "forever minus a single day" copyrights we have now programs written for first gen PCs and consoles won't be out of copyright until our fricking grandchildren are ready for retirement!

Re:I see the master plan

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no point in having multiple copies of the same CD.

So something else is the master plan.

Has Mr. Scott devised a way to cheaply extract silver from optical media?

Re:I see the master plan

[Anonymous Coward]

... or he hates CDs so much that he wants *all* of them so he can dispose of them properly.

Re:I see the master plan

[nukenerd]

Afraid not, a friend of my and myself actually tried contacting some of the old shareware companies .... we found was 1.- etc etc

You should have ignored them. Anyone has the right to distribute shareware. You do know how shareware works don't you? If so, I don't understand why you even contacted them and I expect they didn't either. Here is the first Google definition I've found :- "Shareware is software that is distributed free on a trial basis with the understanding that the user may need or want to pay for it later."

Perhaps there was a misunderstanding here. Shareware can be upgraded to fully paid versions by, well, paying. I guess that these companies were assuming, by your contacting them at all, that you wanted to pay for the upgrade to the full version. So it is hardly suprising if they were taken aback by such a request, and that they no longer had the full version of this ancient DOS stuff by their right elbow.

Re:I see the master plan

[sh00z]

There is no point in having multiple copies of the same CD.

So something else is the master plan.[snip]

I'm betting it's something similar to the Beer Can House.

Re:I see the master plan

[Gr8Apes]

Afraid not, a friend of my and myself actually tried contacting some of the old shareware companies to get permission to make the old shareware on a flash stick with a preconfigured DOSBox so kids could see what it was like in the early 90s.

What we found was

This is why you follow the license on the shareware, and what you did was essentially allow the copyright holders to restrict you retroactively. Most shareware, IIRC, had something along the lines of distribution was fine, you had essentially a "trial" free version, and payment to unlock the entire thing. Abide by those rules, and you should be fine. IANAL....

This is why I think copyrights should be a "use it or lose it" situation, where if a company does not sell their product in retail markets for x number of years they lose the rights which then go into public domain.

I'll agree with this. Personally, I feel the following should happen

• 1) bring back the register the work with the Library of Congress portion within a year of publishing. This will ensure the work remains available even if the publisher goes away.
• 2) make the copyright term truly limited. Since the average life expectancy for men in the US is 74 and you cannot realistically recall most things until you're at least 10, that means the max would have to be less than 64 years to effectively be limited. I would argue 32, rounded down to 30, which is darn close to the original copyright terms. I also am fine with the original clause that required re-registering the copyright halfway through.
• 3) putting something in "the vault" (a la Disney) automatically puts it in the public domain. (the anti-Disney greedy money grubbing clause)
• 4) copyrights are non-transferrable and distribution agreements cannot extend beyond half the copyright term. (guarantees that the copyright creators maintain ownership)

Re: I see the master plan

[Anonymous Coward]

Ha, we did something like that in our college dorm. "Stole" a few bagfuls of aol cds feom the free bin ar Walmart each trip and lined the walls and ceiling with them. Good times.

Re:I see the master plan

[operagost]

Um... unless you were Richie Rich, you made mix TAPES in the 1980s.

Re:I see the master plan

[petermgreen]

Afaict what matters is the actual terms, not whether something is branded as "shareware".

The terms for shareware encouraged sharing with your friends but often restricted other types of distribution. For example from Duke Nukem 3D shareware:

[3] GRANT: 3D Realms grants a non-exclusive, non-transferable, royalty-free
license to distribute the Game only as follows:

[A] INDIVIDUALS are encouraged to share and give copies of the Game to
friends, family, coworkers, and members of any not-for-profit
organization, but only without charge.

[B] ONLINE SERVICES (including BBSs, and WWW and FTP sites) that are free
(except for any subscription fees or incidental Internet access charges),
and BBSs with 250 or fewer nodes (regardless of any charges to users) may
make the Game available for downloading.

[C] These grants are subject to the conditions that no copyright information
or trademark will be added or removed, and all of the Game's files as
released by 3D Realms will be included without modification (except for
"New Levels" as permitted below by this license). The files at a minimum
include:

commit exe 25,942 04-24-96 1:30p
defs con 28,893 04-24-96 1:30p
demo1 dmo 6,226 04-24-96 1:30p
demo2 dmo 9,701 04-24-96 1:30p
demo3 dmo 3,759 04-24-96 1:30p
dn3dhelp exe 73,594 04-24-96 1:30p
duke rts 188,954 04-24-96 1:30p
duke3d exe 1,178,963 04-24-96 1:30p
duke3d grp 11,035,779 04-24-96 1:30p
game con 99,639 04-24-96 1:30p
license txt 9,108 07-16-98 3:56p
modem pck 4,125 04-24-96 1:30p
readme doc 2,760 04-24-96 1:30p
setmain exe 95,177 04-24-96 1:30p
setup exe 27,153 04-24-96 1:30p
ultramid ini 6,871 04-24-96 1:30p
user con 36,960 04-24-96 1:30p

[D] *ALL* other distribution, including by lease, rental, online service
(other than a fewer than 250 node BBS) that charges for online access
time, online service providing multiplayer use, CD-ROM, catalog, and
retail rack REQUIRES WRITTEN PERMISSION (which 3D Realms may withhold in
its discretion) AND PRE-PAYMENT OF A LICENSE FEE OR OTHER MUTUALL

Re: I see the master plan

[Anonymous Coward]

It's funny you mentioned ts because at the central library in NYC there is a small exhibit showing various audio/video media. The compact disc looked absolutely ghetto and trashy compared to the vinyl record or film reel they had in the display case. Yes it's just athstetics but imagine the impression future generations will have on this media

Re:I see the master plan

[SuperKendall]

Yes but in the 90's you burned CDs of 80's songs.

Re:I see the master plan

[Anonymous Coward]

this isn't 'preserving history', it's perverting it.

How, exactly? Is the starcraft image somehow altered? You might want to go and look up what the word "perverting" means....

Re:I see the master plan

[Anonymous Coward]

Please....it's about porn. Nothing but porn. That's the ultimate goal. To end up with discs full of forgotten porn.

Re:I see the master plan

[Anonymous Coward]

and you still had to be a richie rich and a computer nerd to do that.

Re:I see the master plan

[Anonymous Coward]

I just threw out a ton of these disk when I moved a month ago.

To Jason Scott I say. HAHAHA too late old man! You'll never find these disk now!!! HHAHAHAHAHA

Re:I see the master plan

[hairyfeet]

I take it you've never sat down and actually consulted an attorney about contract law, yes? The language used on your average shareware practically invites lawsuits because of the way they are worded.

For example many say something along the lines of "personal and or non profit redistribution" ...would the fact we would have an LLC negate this? What about the fact we were gonna charge the price of the hardware (the actual flash stick) and the shipping to get it to you....would this be considered "profit" even when we simply broke even? Also if you were to actually look at many of the shareware licenses they often had time limits which of course have expired over a decade ago...what would that mean when it comes to redistribution?

Sadly the only way to find this out other than securing the rights would have been to put it out there, get sued, and after spending tens of thousands in court costs see what the district or even supreme court said about this. Otherwise we'd have to set up a second dummy LLC in idontgiveafuckistan and pay pennies to a bunch of Chinese to make the things for us so if anybody tried to sue it would be in a country that doesn't give a fuck about IP, but we just didn't have the kind of funds to jump through that many hoops for a product that by its very nature was gonna be extremely niche in the first place.

Re:I see the master plan

[Gr8Apes]

I'd have to look up some of that shareware I still have, as I haven't read one in a really long time. And yes, I've sat through more contracts with lawyers than I wanted to. it's brain deadening. I do recall the time limitation usually applied to the amount of time you could install and trial the software, not the distribution thereof. So if you distributed a wrapped, self-installing version of the shareware with the shareware in its original form, you'd still be adhering to the license, as it wouldn't be installed until the user ran the VM for the first time. At that point the user is the one subject to the license, not you. And you can get around 99.999% of the cost issues by just making that VM downloadable online via a torrent. If you're truly not looking to make money, you've just side-stepped the entire license debacle.

It's Jason Scott

[narcc]

He's the same guy who brought you the BBS and Text Adventure documentaries. Send him your things!

If you can support floppydump, you can support this guy. He's about the most important computer archivist around.

Re:It's Jason Scott

[Anonymous Coward]

if i had points i'd give you a +1 informative

at first glance i thought 'who the fuck is jason scott and what kind of sick degenerate fetish does he have?'

but now that i know he created the bbs docu it makes sense :)

Re:It's Jason Scott

[ArmoredDragon]

He should have asked me a few years ago. I had a few CDs that are no doubt rare that I'm not sure if I have anymore. One of them was a beta copy of Microsoft's Allegiance (I was invited to the private beta) and the Shareware Quake CD that included ID's complete library of games, and all you had to do was download a keygen to play every single one of the full versions of those games for free.

I also had a big stack of CDs that included full versions of programs that used to be bundled with PCs (back before the era of when they just bundled crapware with them) but I'm pretty sure I threw that away.

Re:It's Jason Scott

[ShanghaiBill]

A disc archive can serve practical purposes. A FreeBSD 1.1 CDROM from 1993, published by Walnut Creek CDROM, was used to defeat a patent troll, Acacia Research, by demonstrating prior art.

Re:It's Jason Scott

[ledow]

I have any number of old disks but just sitting and ISO'ing them would take forever. Shipping costs would also be prohibitive.

However, I would be interested in finding a few old DOS utils that I used to have, and several of those old "we send you a floppy catalogue, you create an order, send the floppy back and we send you the shareware you ordered" services that had the weirdest of things that you couldn't get hold of anywhere else.

Re:It's Jason Scott

[Anonymous Coward]

He also goatse'd Myspace!

Re:It's Jason Scott

[Lumpy]

"Shipping costs would also be prohibitive."

no it's not. jam them in as tight as possible into a $5.95 flat rate box.

Re:It's Jason Scott

[Gr8Apes]

I'm in the process of cleaning out the old software box in the closet. I'll send what I haven't already thrown out (unfortunately there were a few things that were probably somewhat rare).

Re:It's Jason Scott

[Bob the Super Hamste]

My thoughts exactly, buy why even stop at the $5.95 box? I use to ship things to my cousin with the largest flat rate USPS box (~$14 or ~12 to APO/FPO address) all the time when he was serving in Iraq. The box was something like 3/4 of a cubic foot and what ever you managed to stuff in it would ship. Every box I sent was always packed full and most weighed 20lbs or more. I imagine a box full of CDs and floppy disks would weigh less than the ones I sent that were full of mostly books and magazines with the remaining voids filled with smaller things guys in his unit requested.

Re:It's Jason Scott

[Bing Tsher E]

I bought the ID Anthology, which has fully registered 'legal' copies of every game published by ID. Up to Quake 1, which was the current game when the Anthology was published. There is more than the CDs in the box, there's also a Long Distance Dialing time card, some sort of pewter swag item, and there was a T-Shirt but I am certain I wore that out.

I have a lot of Walnet Creek CDs, too,

I also have a CD called the 'C CD' published by a company called Alde which was purportedly a C Source Code CD (it has a collection of public domain source code on it) but is really a hidden stash of girlie GIFs. The hidden directories are simply 'hidden' with the 'hiden' filesystem flag. It's also ISO-9660 non-compliant, I am not sure how, but it kicks out certain errors. I suspect it's either pre-ISO-9660 or was just from the era before the standard was strongly in place (or the publisher was sneaking out a CD of girlie GIFS and not paying much attention)

I hope someone is archiving the old CDROM porn collections. There were a number of publishers, and it was cheesy but quite expensive for the time.

Re:It's Jason Scott

[King_TJ]

Yeah.... it's Jason Scott, the guy I had the dubious privilege of having a fairly long, involved conversation/debate with on a Facebook forum a while back. (I belong to a private message group someone created on there where people discuss the "good old days" of the local BBS scene in the area code I lived in back then.)

The BBS Documentary Project was brought up and somehow he was invited to the discussion. I thought that was pretty cool, initially, because I'm one of the people who did an advance purchase of that set of DVDs when I heard it was coming out. I'd never had a conversation with Jason Scott before, but always admired the guy for caring enough about the BBS scene and preserving it as a part of history to make the documentary. (Heck, part of me always wanted to do one myself. I went through a phase where I bought a fair bit of video editing and recording gear and helped make DVDs out of other people's footage from vacations and other events, and wanted to produce something of my own. But life got in the way, as it often does .... a messy divorce, a kid I had to raise on my own, and demands of a new job pretty much squashed that little dream for me.)

But hey, here was a guy in a different place in life who was able to run around the country in his R.V. and actually go get all of these interviews and make the documentary. So, cool... I was happy to give him a little financial support by buying a copy.

After Facebook, my opinion of him changed a bit. For starters, it seems he's really NOT very good at handling constructive criticism. Many of us, for example, simply felt his documentary was oddly biased in a few parts and wanted to ask him why he made some of those choices. For example, after watching the whole thing, I was a little perplexed why he left so much footage in there covering the "ANSI artwork scene"? I fondly remember the days when the WWIV BBS owners would play around in the ANSI art editors for DOS, creating cool welcome screens, and how certain folks achieved near celebrity status as the top ANSI artists out there. But most of the documentary interviewed these younger kids who were part of the later scene that was a very minor footnote. (We're talking the "warez BBS" groups at this point, with people who often as not, just processed GIF or JPG images into ANSI art with utilities and made massive things that had to scroll through 2 full screen displays to see the whole image.) And IMO, their interviews came off pretty arrogant - like the whole BBS community revolved around their work or something. It just felt inaccurate to me.

So anyway, we brought that up to Scott - but to my surprise, he started attacking us, rather than having an honest discussion about why that choice was made. It turned into a big finger-pointing session of "If you think YOU can do so much better, why don't you make your OWN documentary then!?" It wasn't much different when a few of us wanted to know why our requests, back in the day, to get interviewed for the project were ignored. (Basically, he never interviewed a single person living in our area code or any surrounding area codes, yet we had a huge, fairly influential BBS scene in the 80's.) He turned it into a rant on how expensive it was to drive all over the country to collect all of the footage, and how there was no way he could interview everyone who contacted him, etc. etc.

At the end of the day, I'm still very happy he got some of the interviews captured on video that he did. Some of that would surely be lost to history if it wasn't done. And yes, kudos to him for actually going out there any making this documentary when clearly, the rest of us weren't willing or able to do it at that point in time. But man -- drop the negative attitude! Most of us who would even make the effort to discuss this thing with you and question it are among the core group who actually LIVED it. We actually watched all 4 DVDs full of what you put together, which frankly, MOST people would never even do because they'd find it too "dull a

Re:It's Jason Scott

[Anonymous Coward]

If it was made in Jan 1993 you are in luck, I have the CD with all the shareware that month ;)

Along with a whole box of floppies but only some of the oldest is usable :( 360K disks are tough little buggers.

1st question . . .

[Anonymous Coward]

What exactly is a CD-ROM?

Re:1st question . . .

[Anonymous Coward]

Something like a CD-RAM, but it's read only.

Re:1st question . . .

[I'm New Around Here]

So, like a smaller version of the WORM (Write Once, Read Many) disks? A compact version of it, if you will.

Cannot Have Mine

[DERoss]

I save old CDs and DVDs. About this time of year, I take several and drill a small hole near the edge of each disc. Using kite twine, I then hang them from my fruit trees and grape vines to scare birds away. I have to do that shortly before the fruit ripens so that I can harvest the ripe fruit before the birds get used to the flashing of the discs as they rotate in the sun. I need a supply of discs because the silvering eventually deteriorates hanging outdoors.

Re:Cannot Have Mine

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to make scale armor for live action role play games: it's light, very durable, easy to work with a Dremel tool, and provides a modest amount of very real protection against casual blade or blunt attacks.

Re:Cannot Have Mine

[xeos]

Nice idea. BUT: I wonder if there's any issue with toxic chemicals from the breaking down of the disks? Even if it's small, if you do it a lot of times it would accumulate.

Re:Cannot Have Mine

[Anonymous Coward]

Grandpa! ....You're embarrassing me.

Re:Cannot Have Mine

[Ulric]

I save old CDs and DVDs. About this time of year, I take several and drill a small hole near the edge of each disc. Using kite twine, I then hang them from my fruit trees and grape vines to scare birds away.

And the birds go "Aah! The AOL disks are coming! The AOL disks are coming!"

Re:Cannot Have Mine

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do you save them? Sofia Lucifairy

Re:Cannot Have Mine

[JaredOfEuropa]

Nice, I will try that! How many do you have to hang up (per tree) for it to be effective?

Re:Cannot Have Mine

[Anonymous Coward]

... why wouldn't you just wrap shiny foil around the discs?

Or better yet, hang sharks with lasers attached to their heads from the trees instead.
The sharks won't even need to fry the birds, the birds would just drop dead from sheer confusion at the thought.

Re:Cannot Have Mine

[millwall]

Does it not leave your garden looking like an AOL xmas forest?

Re:Cannot Have Mine

[DERoss]

I save them so that I will have enough as the ones I already used start to deteriorate.

Re:Cannot Have Mine

[DERoss]

I hung six from my loquat tree (Eriobotrya japonica). Later this year, I will leave those that are towards my peach tree, hang about five from the peach itself, and one or two from the Australian tea tree near the peach tree. The grape vines will get their own, two or three on each vine.

Remember, timing is important. You do not want the birds to become accustomed to the flashing before the fruit is ripe.

Re:Cannot Have Mine

[antdude]

Cool idea, but it wouldn't work in hot dry areas that can start fires easily. :(

AOL CDs

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll trade for some new coasters.

Walnut Creek CD-ROM

[ls671]

I remembered Walnut Creek CD-ROM was the official publisher of slackware back then.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Re:Walnut Creek CD-ROM

[motokochan]

In a way, they still are. FreeBSD Mall, which was spun off from Walnut Creek, has been handling the Slackware Store for years. It may not say that right on the store page, but the physical mailing address is the same.

Re:Walnut Creek CD-ROM

[xeos]

Yeap. I wouldn't call Walnut Creek shovel-ware.

Re:Walnut Creek CD-ROM

[CoderJoe]

I actually have a number of them, though without the case inserts and booklets...

Here, have some Linux CD labels or some for online services.

Re:Walnut Creek CD-ROM

[Anonymous Coward]

Not just Slackware, but also the demoscene!

Re:Walnut Creek CD-ROM

[Anonymous Coward]

In a way, they still are. FreeBSD Mall, which was spun off from Walnut Creek, has been handling the Slackware Store for years. It may not say that right on the store page, but the physical mailing address is the same.

Then again it might....
https://www.freebsdmall.com/cgi-bin/fm/history.html

Re:Walnut Creek CD-ROM

[Bing Tsher E]

It kind of annoyed me to see Walnut Creek being called 'shovel-ware' in the summary. They published whole archives of MS-DOS as a unit and provided a service to those of us who weren't well-connected. The SIMTEL MS-DOS archive and the CICA archive.

I would send images to this collector, but originals are going to one day be valuable collector's items.

I have the first Linux-on-CD distribution, it was published by Yggdrasil and it's called 'LGX' which I think they were hoping to coin as their own proprietary name for a Linux Distro. Yggdrail made numerous other versions of their 'Plug and Play Linux' distribution, but the first one was published with a plain white manual cover with green/black ink printing. It is THE first time Linux was published on a CD, in the Fall of 1992. I bought it at 'CD-ROM City' which was a storefront in Dinkytown. Back in the dialup era stores that sold a large variety of CD-ROMs were a godsend.

This man is the bomb

[Anonymous Coward]

Sooooo many games he will be publishing. I want his bod for this. ~~~Tina~~~

I remember when.

[dohzer]

I remember when we used to receive DVDs with new hardware. That was almost a week ago now, when I purchased a new modem.

Re:I remember when.

[samwichse]

Well, they sold you a MODEM.

Of course it's going to come with a software CD. You bought a MODEM! (yes, I know, you could be talking about cable/DSL/FIOS)

Re:I remember when.

[neurovish]

I bought an external USB HD enclosure within the last 6 months, and *that* came with a cd-rom. I have no idea what is on it.

All of my AOL cd's

[l0n3s0m3phr34k]

have been destroyed. A few tech friends and I had a HUGE pile, so we took them all and spent a few hours throwing them again a wall in an abandoned industrial area. Much fun!

Re:All of my AOL cd's

[Bob the Super Hamste]

My friends and I use to load them in the clay pigeon launcher.

Re:All of my AOL cd's

[thejesses]

Gave all mine to a friend who lined his dorm room with the silver side facing out. Yippee.

Re:All of my AOL cd's

[Bob the Super Hamste]

In college we use to microwave them and then mount them around the peep hole in the door.

Jason Scott, been a long time...

[Anonymous Coward]

Jason Scott is an awesome dude, met him at Notacon and in HOPE and again at Defcon...

I'm Acidtonic from the infonomicon radio guys.... (kn1ghtl0rd, droops, lowtekMystic, and many others)

Shouts from the good old days... We definitely need to get back together on IRC sometime!

Re:Jason Scott, been a long time...

[djsmiley]

come by hash archiveteam-bs on efnet

I'm sure you can figure it out.

Extreme hoarders

[Anonymous Coward]

Next up:
Man found dead in apartment, crushed by thousands of CD-roms as shelves above toilet collapse.

Be careful what you wish for!

[jtara]

Subject says it. I kept all those AOL CDs for just this purpose. For many years. It was quite a pile! Then decided that was silly when I moved. Gone, years, ago. If you find them in Asian landfills, it will answer a burning controversy. Is that where this stuff goes? Or not? But I do have some stuff. Just not as common as AOL CDs. Hmmm...

- Wired Rip. Sample. Mash. Share. Some rights reserved.

Ohh, ohh, ohh, HotMetal Pro 6.0

Buncha CDs that came in the back of expensive paperback tech books from Bookstar. Microsoft developer-type stuff, ATL, COM, etc.

The usual collection of drivers and install disks for long-dead hardware and long-obsolete software, that everybody else has too.

AOLs and shareware CDs gone, baby, gone!

Well, you're not getting this (in part because it's proprietary source code) but I just found a 1985 floppy with source code for what is now Siemens TeamCenter Lifecycle Visualization Variation Analysis. (OK, half the source code, cause it says disk 1 of 2, and I don't have 2. Or a 5" floppy drive.) 30 year old software that is still alive and kicking, and has been (and is) instrumental in the design of... well, probably everything that anybody here drives, flies in, blows somebody up with, or records data on (if it rotates...). I guess NDAs are still good 30 years later, huh? :( Wonder if Siemens might like it? This is version 1.0.3. It's in my old "code samples box".

I guess if you were into how and why mass-produced mechanical thingies that fit together have been made to fit-together so much better and better over the past 30 years, that one might represent some significant bit of geeky history.

Re:Be careful what you wish for!

[Bing Tsher E]

I once encountered a floppy diskette that was part of the Microsoft Word 6.0 installation set. This was apparently a special edition, because it was on a 360K floppy diskette. I believe it was disk x of 100 something.

I still have Windows 98 on 5-1/4" floppies, because Microsoft offered to send it to you for free if you bought the edition distributed on 3-1/2" floppies. I have two sets because for some reason they shipped me two copies when I requested them.

The 5-1/4" distribution of Windows 95 is unique in that it's the only distribution of Windows 95 that doesn't require a CD key or fingerprint the diskette when you install it. For years I had a copy of that on CD that was the contents of all the diskettes copied into a single directory and burned to CD. It's the most primitive and first release of Windows 95, back when Microsoft was competing with CompuServ and AOL to be the 'Online Service', hence from before 'the Internet' had been discovered by Microsoft. It's really 'clean' and small with no Internet Anything installed. And as the first ever version of Windows 95 it has EVERY bug of the initial release (obviously)

Too late!

[colinjl]

Only a couple of months ago I ditched around half a cubic metre of CD-ROMs and floppies: shareware, MSDN, TechNet, Novell SEL, hardware drivers, even shrink-wrapped MS-DOS, XTree Gold, ...

Blows my mind

[PrimeWaveZ]

I have an addiction to information collection for my specific interests, which is why I'm going north of 12TB of historical crap. I understand his desire to archive all the things.

At least my wife can't complain about the amount of physical space the data takes up since HDD densities have been getting better recently...

CD:s, that's cheating

[Ulric]

Software should be distributed as hex code in magazines, to be typed in by the users.

Re:CD:s, that's cheating

[Anonymous Coward]

Software should be distributed as hex code in magazines, to be typed in by the users.

Awww... You make me miss Compute's Gazette.

Re:CD:s, that's cheating

[ledow]

I still have a complete set of INPUT magazine. Some of the biggest programs in it are exactly that, with explanations of the decoding.

Hell, I even chatted to one guy on here who had written one of the biggest of those programs when he was just a kid.

Those were the days.

Re:CD:s, that's cheating

[Anonymous Coward]

Still have a big box full of Compute magazines as well.....used 'em with my Commodore 64

Re:CD:s, that's cheating

[Bing Tsher E]

Source code was distributed in interesting ways in the era when 'online' was the 7-bit ASCII stream.

I have the 'Forbidden Subjects' CD-ROM, sold by mail order out of the back of various magazines back in the 90's. It has a large collection of all the TABOO stuff from the internet back then. All the occult 'Black Magick and satanism' archives, including stuff published without permission from organizations like the OTO and TOPY.

It also has a large collect of phrack magazine and a bunch of virus newsletters and article archives. Reading it turned me off to the Virus scene because I had assumed it would have interesting discussions of exploits published as ASM source code. Instead all it featured for the most part was 'debug scripts' which were streams of characters to pipe into DEBUG to generate virus .COM files. I am sure that somewhere there were more than Script Kiddies out there, but the real hackers held their cards closer than the stuff published in the Forbidden Subjects CD.

Interesting fact

[DrXym]

The conference rooms tables in AOL used to have busted up AOL CDs set into them. So a few of them found some lasting use.

Installing the internet

[Anonymous Coward]

I think I have an CD from 1999, containing some files to "install the internet" on my PC. .... basicly just a browser setup and some HTML install instructions on how to get the ISDN card working...

Those were the days.... :D

Virus scan!

[KreAture]

I hope he runs a full sweep on every disc! Would be awsome to see the list now in retrospect.
Let's see who shipped out viruses and trojans, and which ones.

Re:Virus scan!

[djsmiley]

The discs generally go up as pure rips via archive.org, you might be able to find something ya self? :)

Not dead

[Darinbob]

CD-ROM era may be closing, but the era of physical distribution is not. The cloud is a myth. Sure it may be used by the hordes but people who want security, privacy, safety, convenience, etc, will continue use physical storage. Computers and device will continue to require physical storage for decades to come. Just because the teens don't use something doesn't make it dead.

Re:Not dead

[Bing Tsher E]

If the teens DO use something, it's about to be dead. Or eventually will.

Physical distribution won't ever go away. There are entities that wish it would. But a TRS-80 Model 100 still has everything you need to write a novel. An HP-95 pocket computer still has everything you need for most mobile calculations.

Heck, an old Olivetti manual typewriter and a ream of paper is still a powerful set of tools for idea capture and creation.

History in the making

[should_be_linear]

Now, this seems like huge pile of crap. Two hundred years from now? OK, still huge pile of crap.

Re:History in the making

[JaredOfEuropa]

What if this pile of crap is the *only* surviving archive after 200 years?

Re: History in the making

[Anonymous Coward]

I doubt they would be readable.

I have always maintained...

[tlambert]

I have always maintained that the missing mass of the Universe is AOL discs.

You've probably got a spindle in your closet,

[sound vision]

You've probably got a spindle in your closet...

Nope, definitely no AOL coaster spindles in my closet. Hell, they didn't even work well as coasters! Judging by the amount of broken discs lying around on the street 15 years ago, nobody else kept them either. Nor have I kept driver discs since I got broadband. Getting them off the internet is easier, plus you get a newer version of the driver to boot.

Re:You've probably got a spindle in your closet,

[Bing Tsher E]

The hardware producers deprecate drivers and eventually take them offline. So if you're working with an older version of hardware or need the drivers for an older version of the OS, you're out of luck.

That doesn't matter in the least for the 'shiney-new' crowd. It's 'easier' to just download the official approved drivers, and when the drivers are no longer available flash some plastic for the new hardware.

Why would anybody want 'old' stuff? Isn't it illegal to use 'old' stuff since it takes away from the producers who want you to pay them for 'new' stuff? (the boys in Washington need to get working on this issue)

finite?

[Anonymous Coward]

Um, finished, you mean? Everything real is finite. Maybe you meant "shuttered"? That's the fashionable word for "closed" these days, err, anymore.

Yeah, "shuttered anymore".

send me a prepaid box

[Anonymous Coward]

These things weigh a ton. I have a huge stack of just about every CD I received/bought/obtained. but how am I going to ship them from the UK ?
Maybe I can list them as "collection only"

I even have the Click magazine vol 1 which was a CD in box you bought at the newsagents.

Re:send me a prepaid box

[djsmiley]

You could rip em for us and upload the iso's ? (archive.org)

Oh and then scan the cover, and the disk...

Pity

[Anonymous Coward]

I trashed all my burnt CDs and DVDs a while back.

I have some, somewhere

[Hognoxious]

I had a box full of those - I was intending to put them in a picture frame - but I have no idea where it is.

I remember I deduped it a few years back.

Wait everyone! Let me check Snopes first...

[TheRealHocusLocus]

Sample text: "Jason Scott, 13, is a terminally ill patient of [one of several diseases], and his one passion in life is to [various hobbies, including collecting AOL disks, pop tabs, Montana Gold 55 grain Full Metal Jacket .223 ammo, etc.] and his [mother, sister, uncle] has announced that he would like to get into the Guinness Book of Records..."

Status: TRUE until someone does some brief and simple research and discovers it is FALSE.

But will they be able to stop it? FALSE.

Whats happening with Slackware now?

[Viol8]

The latest major release was in 2013 when previously they were every 6 months! Sure, there are still package updates being done but seems to me momentum has been lost. Anyone have any info on what the problem is?

Re:Whats happening with Slackware now?

[Anonymous Coward]

They are slacking off?

Re:Whats happening with Slackware now?

[volkerdi]

When's the last time it was every six months?

Hint: It was probably sometime back when the release was two CDs, and not 6 CDs and 2 double-sided DVDs.

Re:Whats happening with Slackware now?

[Viol8]

Well if you still want slackware to be taken seriously you'll do a proper release more than once every 2 years and counting. You can't expect people to download a 2 year old release and spend the rest of the day doing update.

Good idea.

[nospam007]

CD-archive.org seems to be free, yet.

The Silent Cultural Good-Night

[TheRealHocusLocus]

When my father died, it was as if a whole library had burned down.
~Laurie Anderson

Until we learn to mourn for all the music that might soon be lost
or the movies that never made it to DVD, or even VHS,
because it was never transferred from vinyl, or film
because people do not cherish vinyl when they see it at Goodwill
or more tragically, someone dies --- and the collection of a lifetime goes into the landfill
because the dozen people who stopped by at the garage sale had no interest
when everything you 'own' is inside your phone,
a single toilet can swallow Western Civilization
remember that direct-to-digital CD? Now all you have is a badly encoded mp3
all those books that were fascinating but went right over your head as a kid,
wouldn't it be great to know which ones they were?
every day there are fewer people out there who have read things that never made it to 'digital'
another one died this morning.
so-called 'magnetic master tapes' cannot master time, they fade into Gaussian noise
a decently kept mass-produced vinyl phonograph record is the BEST way to recover the music
how many of your family's most precious photographs are on paper, anywhere?
have you spilled water on one lately?
most families these days have NOT A SINGLE MEMBER who considers themself a LIBRARIAN
a (tragically thankless) job of gathering, organizing, copying, re-distributing the copies
and ensuring that at least some of them are stored safely. Writings, photos. Even who is related to whom!
YOU may be the only likely candidate. Unless you begin tomorrowit will never be done by anyone.
on the Internet it's even worse. How many entities can you think of that store Internet pages
long term with a real commitment? The Wayback machine and who else?
newer tech better? Not necessarily so, IF it breeds such a mass complacency about simple
preservation of knowledge that the day arrives when EVERYONE thinks making backups and
saving previous generations of knowledge and artistic works is SOMEONE ELSE'S JOB.
In such a situation we could 'lose' more than half of everything that was worth saving
in a single human lifetime. Are we living in that time span now?
Think about it (please!).

WE ARE LIVING IN A FUTURE DARK AGE
A too-short history of data retention
The only day we clearly recall some day may be the day we lost all our memories.

The real challenge is to get AOL floppies

[Anonymous Coward]

Way back in the day when I was on AOL (yeah yeah I know) I would periodicly order a free AOL floppy and reformat it for my own use. :) Sadly they went to CD-ROM only but for a while I was getting free high density floppies from them. :)

Will he pay shipping?

[jpellino]

Cuz I have three cabinets full. Not sure I'll hand over Oregon Trail, tho.

Re:Will he pay shipping?

[Bing Tsher E]

Wouldn't Oregon Trail be on punched paper tape? Or maybe 1200 BPI 1/2" tape?

I know there were later CD-ROM versions of Oregon Trail. For the newbs.

Nostaligia

[Dan East]

I can understand the sense of nostalgia. I'd love to have all my Amiga floppies from when I was a kid. I'd also love to see all the dial-up local BBSs I frequented in the late 80s back up in glorious glaring ANSI (via a web interface, of course). But it's gone forever. Not a shred of it is left, which makes me a little sad. The BBS era is certainly one that was not captured for posterity. I'm sure there are a few here and there that might have been pulled off an old HDD and put online, but I'd say 99% of them (and there were a lot, and they had a lot of content) are gone forever. I don't hear people lamenting this much, but it was a segment of human society that first developed and introduced the concept of online digital connectivity to humanity, and it was not preserved.

Re:Nostaligia

[Dan East]

To illustrate just how much content I'm talking about, here is a list of BBSs just in the Cleveland area code of Ohio where I grew up:
http://bbslist.textfiles.com/2...

There are 759 BBSs in that list, representing just one little slice of Ohio. Each one was a microcosm all unto itself. There are dozens of different types of BBS software represented there. Each BBS was hand-crafted and configured by the individual sysop with the style, color, behavior, etc, and hardly any two of them were even remotely similar. It was a point of pride for sysops to have a unique looking board, and they were updated often. Some where awful, some were great, but they were all handcrafted extensions of the people who made them. Each had its own character and personality, and the discussion forums and online games drew different types of people together. Some were mainly gaming BBSs, running multi-player online games like Trade Wars ( http://geekswithblogs.net/cwil... ), others had tons of shareware files you could download, others focused on discussion forums and communication, and of course others delved into the darker realms of illegal file sharing, etc. But again, they were all unique, and they are all gone.

Re:Nostaligia

[Reziac]

I used to maintain a BBS list for my local SoCal calling area. That was about 55 BBSs, and as you say -- all different, all with their own unique flavor -- which depended on the mix of board software, file areas, message areas, and the users those attracted. A few survive as internet-accessable (including Techware, which was also the last of our local dialups) but for the most part... a lost era.

http://www.techware2k.com/publ...

Windows 1.0

[tsqr]

Too bad the only floppies he wants are shareware. I still have the 5-1/4" media for Windows 1.0 that came with my first PC.

Lots of storage space

[Anonymous Coward]

Pretty smart idea. He's going to use them as storage. I thought about doing the same thing a while back. There is actually a ton of free space on many of those disks. Back when I was dirt poor I used to use them as a free storage media.

done?

[Anonymous Coward]

i still burn cds and dvds almost everyday, and if bluerays would not be made and instead something not property of sony would have taken the crown, i would be burning those too

its not like i like burning them, which i do, its just i cant even use something else for certain tasks, i have never ever figured a way to make usb sticks bootable, linux or otherwise, they never EVER boot, it doesnt matter if i do them manually, or with an automated program, they simply wont ever work

Viruses

[hackwrench]

I downloaded much of the files at http://cd.textfiles.com/ and antivirus went berzerk.

Re:Viruses

[mOzone]

stuff is so old ....inless inless your running win95 nothing to worry about

They were a scary behemoth!

[Anonymous Coward]

Wikipedia tells me that at one point half of all CDs in the world had the AOL logo on them. AOL's marketing team was operating on a truly staggering level. They achieved an unparalleled ubiquity and notoriety, and it paid off: there are still 2.1 million dial-up subscribers (as of March). To be honest, I'm a little surprised that the "walled garden" strategy didn't win out. I know the techies didn't like it, but there are only so many techies, and there are millions of people that don't want or need much more from the Internet besides Facebook and Wikipedia.

Anyway, I don't feel like trying to bring this back around to a follow-up joke, so count this one as hijacking a highly-rated post for an informative tangent.

Why drill?

[paugq]

CDs and DVDs already have a big hole in the center. Why are you drilling a new one? You are wasting your time, and also freeing residues that will later go to your trees and vines. (I also use CDs and DVDs for the same purpose :-) )

Re:Why drill?

[DERoss]

Using the large hole in the middle will not allow the disc to hang vertically and twirl in the breeze. I drill a small hole -- about the diameter of a pencil lead -- about 1/8 inch from the edge.

Re:Why drill?

[Anonymous Coward]

Could you get like a metal clip, and just clip the wire to the side? Or would that wear the material down, the pressure from the clip?

I am the UPS guy

[argee]

I am the UPS delivery guy. I get paid by the package. This guy ROCKS!