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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!
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 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.
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.
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!
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.