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