Slashdot Mirror
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!
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.
Required reading for internet skeptics
I remembered Walnut Creek CD-ROM was the official publisher of slackware back then.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
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.