Lost Something? Search Through 91.7 Million Files From the 80s, 90s, and 2000s (arstechnica.com) 57
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Today, tech archivist Jason Scott announced a new website called Discmaster that lets anyone search through 91.7 million vintage computer files pulled from CD-ROM releases and floppy disks. The files include images, text documents, music, games, shareware, videos, and much more. The files on Discmaster come from the Internet Archive, uploaded by thousands of people over the years. The new site pulls them together behind a search engine with the ability to perform detailed searches by file type, format, source, file size, file date, and many other options.
Discmaster is the work of a group of anonymous history-loving programmers who approached Scott to host it for them. Scott says that Discmaster is "99.999 percent" the work of that anonymous group, right down to the vintage gray theme that is compatible with web browsers for older machines. Scott says he slapped a name on it and volunteered to host it on his site. And while Scott is an employee of the Internet Archive, he says that Discmaster is "100 percent unaffiliated" with that organization.
One of the highlights of Discmaster is that it has already done a lot of file format conversion on the back end, making the vintage files more accessible. For example, you can search for vintage music files -- such as MIDI or even digitized Amiga sounds -- and listen to them directly in your browser without any extra tools necessary. The same thing goes for early-90s low-resolution video files, images in obscure formats, and various types of documents. "It's got all the conversion to enable you to preview things immediately," says Scott. "So there's no additional external installation. That, to me, is the fundamental power of what we're dealing with here." "The value proposition is the value proposition of any freely accessible research database," Scott told Ars Technica. "People are enabled to do deep dives into more history, reference their findings, and encourage others to look in the same place."
"[Discmaster] is probably, to me, one of the most important computer history research project opportunities that we've had in 10 years," says Scott. "It's not done. They've analyzed 7,000 and some-odd CD-ROMs. And they're about to do another 8,000."
Discmaster is the work of a group of anonymous history-loving programmers who approached Scott to host it for them. Scott says that Discmaster is "99.999 percent" the work of that anonymous group, right down to the vintage gray theme that is compatible with web browsers for older machines. Scott says he slapped a name on it and volunteered to host it on his site. And while Scott is an employee of the Internet Archive, he says that Discmaster is "100 percent unaffiliated" with that organization.
One of the highlights of Discmaster is that it has already done a lot of file format conversion on the back end, making the vintage files more accessible. For example, you can search for vintage music files -- such as MIDI or even digitized Amiga sounds -- and listen to them directly in your browser without any extra tools necessary. The same thing goes for early-90s low-resolution video files, images in obscure formats, and various types of documents. "It's got all the conversion to enable you to preview things immediately," says Scott. "So there's no additional external installation. That, to me, is the fundamental power of what we're dealing with here." "The value proposition is the value proposition of any freely accessible research database," Scott told Ars Technica. "People are enabled to do deep dives into more history, reference their findings, and encourage others to look in the same place."
"[Discmaster] is probably, to me, one of the most important computer history research project opportunities that we've had in 10 years," says Scott. "It's not done. They've analyzed 7,000 and some-odd CD-ROMs. And they're about to do another 8,000."
Nice timing there, sport (Score:5, Funny)
Search has been down since 8PM last night. Good thing this site isn't popular any more, a slashdotting would probably not help
Re:Nice timing there, sport (Score:5, Informative)
Wow... I didn't know that Slashdot still had the traffic to take down a site when it got put on the front page.
Did this also get linked to on Reddit?
Re:Nice timing there, sport (Score:5, Insightful)
I've wondered about this lately, if Slashdotting is still a thing. I think that it's very unlikely sites get Slashdotted any more for two reasons - Slashdot doesn't get the traffic it used to, and websites are much, much more resilient and scalable than they used to be. Think about the computing power a website ran on 20 years ago compared to today.
Re:Nice timing there, sport (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, a lot more of the rendering work is pushed off on the client. Old sites had to run a bunch of PHP scripts or CGI or whatever. Now you just serve a bundle of javascript + have a few CRUD endpoints to spit out the data, and the browser assembles the DOM.
Re: (Score:2)
Clients used to DDOS web sites. Now web sites DDOS the client.
Re: (Score:3)
It takes a lot to slashdot most sites any more. I wonder how often a good slashdotting is misdiagnosed as a DDoS.
Re: (Score:2)
Now? Probably never. 20 years ago? Probably.
Re: (Score:2)
It's working at 2022-10-19 15:10 EDT. And I found a few of my files in there, which warms my heart. Not quite as cool as stumbling across the ORCH-85 (for the TRS-80) transcriptions I helped do of a couple of Rush songs in the early 80s, which I found about 3-4 years ago, but it's still cool.
Re: (Score:2)
Good looking out. I see whatever they used to play mods gets protracker tempo correct, so I name it good
Re: Nice timing there, sport (Score:2)
And I'm pinning this until I get some free time to look for some old bbs stuff
Nice (Score:3)
This is a cool project. I hope they keep expanding it even beyond their current plans.
I had to say it (Score:5, Informative)
There's loads of uncensored porn. I give the website two weeks before it's brought down by a load of Cease-and-Desist requests, together with angry mobs of "think-of-the-children" people with torches and pitchforks.
Re: I had to say it (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
It's a rather low chance for someone to recognize someone else from 20+ or 30+ years ago in a rather obscure corner of the Interwebz and say something about it.
Will this find those lost porn files from the 80s? (Score:5, Funny)
The only thing that brings a new technology to the forefront is porn.
Re:Will this find those lost porn files from the 8 (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, plenty to go around. Look up NSFW images and videos.
Just not the same... (Score:3, Interesting)
Nothing is going to bring back those print shop pro 5 and other cd's that exploded in drives with high read speeds (56x if I recall).
I remember when mythbusters declared the exploding CD in high speed drives myth 'Busted' and laughing. I think their testing failed because the issue was a combination of flaws in the discs from some manufacturers which only resulted in a fault at the high rpm rate after enough internal stresses had accumulated over time. I probably swapped about a hundred drives filled with shattered disc fragments. So that is no myth.
Of course most people probably didn't see that many. At the time I worked for a local pc shop in the midwest and we'd bundled paint shop pro 5 along with new systems and this disc being the most common culprit quickly became obvious to us. They also didn't fail immediately... those calls came in sporadically over the next couple years. Incidentally, if you disassembled the drive and shook out all the fragments the drives typically worked fine. It was cheaper to just swap them, they didn't qualify for warranty replacement, so I think everyone in the shop had drives they'd fixed after the fact in their home systems. ;)
Iomega 1-step (Score:3)
I still have some backups from the 90's that I can't access.
Re:Iomega 1-step (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
"Iomega’s fortunes were tied to its Zip drive and when sales began to wane, its stock went from $100 per share in the 1990s, and plummeted to just $2 in the mid 2000s."
[...]
"In 2008 Iomega was acquired by EMC and it became a division of the storage giant offering a range of storage servers."
HP did buy and kill Palm though...
https://www.silicon.co.uk/data-storage/storage/tales-tech-history-iomega-zip-drive-209499
Re: (Score:1)
Iomega ditto. (Score:2)
It was a high-density mag tape cartridge, not a disk.
The Iomega one was the "ditto" serie.
The first models (named simply "Tape") used the same kind of QIC tape cartridge as other manufacturer in the field.
Later models (including the LPT-connected "ditto 800" I got second hand) used Travan tapes (slightly larger cartridge and much more capacity, the tape drive itself is still backward compatible with classic QIC).
A quick glance at Wikipedia reveals that "Tecmar" (never heard of them) bought ditto from Iomega.
Most of the industry has moved on.
- On the p
Re: (Score:2)
I have copies of a bunch of floppy backups made with Norton Backup 3.0. I can't believe there's not something that can decode them. I supposed I could try running it in a VM (or DOSBox), but I haven't bothered yet.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Back in the era of hacked FTP servers hosting all manner of hidden files, one could come across peculiar and odd things.
One that I tripped over was the source code for Colorado Backup for DOS.
Your plaint reminded me... good luck. Best bet might be someone's old ZIP drive being sold intact on eBay. (I'm pretty sure I have what you need in a box somewhere, but finding it... unlikely.)
I think I know what the business model is (Score:4, Interesting)
Betcha that the original reason this team bothered to start this project is to look for some of those legendary troves left behind by early Bitcoiners, in the days when people could mine thousands of them on an idle PC and leave them on a hard drive that would later be abandoned. After a specialized search of their data trove to grab any such files, why not release all the miscellaneous junk to the general public?
Re:I think I know what the business model is (Score:5, Informative)
History loving? (Score:5, Insightful)
No files from the 80s through to the 2000s is out of copyright, so basically this would count as 91.7 million cases of copyright infringement.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
Unfortunately, copyright law cares not about your love of history. Copyright is basically long enough to cover things that would be considered historical rather than contemporary.
No files from the 80s through to the 2000s is out of copyright, so basically this would count as 91.7 million cases of copyright infringement.
Half of Archive.org is copyrighted files. It's just a matter of whether the copyright holder cares enough to go searching for 20 year old files. A lot of them don't.
Re: (Score:2)
Half of Archive.org is copyrighted files.
All of archive.org is copyrighted files. Copyright exists for a work as soon as it is recorded.
Re: (Score:3)
I agree, and I question why they didn't just build the index and link all the media to archive.org.
Take this CD [textfiles.com] for instance. They have a link to the CD's page on archive.org, which includes all the same media: the .iso, the images, but Discmaster has copied the files onto its own web server. I would rather have them work something out with archive.org so that they can use the images from archive.org on their site and have all links to download go to archive.org. That way they can shield themselves a lit
Re: (Score:2)
No, there are a few files I created which are definitely not infringements. So that should be 91,699,994.
Just a little oopsie, nothing to see here (Score:3)
SEARCH IS DOWN :(
Oct 19 8:16AM EST
Good morning.
The database restore is taking longer than we had hoped. Sorry
New ETA: Today, Oct 19 around Noon
Oct 18 9:24PM EST
We identified 2 different issues that caused the search to crash.
The search database is being recovered, which will take several hours.
We hope to have search back online tomorrow, Oct 19 by 9AM EST.
Once again, sorry about the search downtime.
Oct 18 8:04PM EST
Sorry, but search is currently DOWN. We are super bummed about it.
We are ACTIVELY working on it.
No ETA at this time.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Trojan? (Score:1)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
Malwarebytes does this a lot.
Note that it's not saying a Trojan was found, just that the site *might* contain one.
Their heuristic seems to be "anything not mainstream is dangerous so don't go there".
Re: (Score:1)
Probably accurate, given the amount of shareware on the site, that stuff was full with viruses.
Re: (Score:2)
MBAM is pretty good, except for their web stuff. If you have pro so you have real time scanning, you might as well just disable the web crap. If you're going to sleazy parts of the web, you should use noscript anyway.
Yes!! I can reinstall Real Player (Score:2)
Gotta let these young whippersnappers feel the pain of trying to uninstall that bastage.
Re: (Score:2)
Gotta let these young whippersnappers feel the pain of trying to uninstall that bastage.
Or get it to work consistently.
I searched for "AOL" ... (Score:1)
Just a site that searches archive.org (Score:1)
All files were uploaded to archive.org by thousands of different users.
Looking for a game from an old computer magazine (Score:2)
It was a kind of top down adventure RPG, where the player moved around a pretty large map, shooting fireballs at bad guys such as walking trees, giants, and other fantasy creatures. One had to collect keys to open magic g
Re: (Score:2)
Sylvan Idyll is from the Apple II disk magazine "Softdisk". Specifically, issue #127. It is available (and playable in-browser!) here: https://archive.org/details/21... [archive.org]
It is a sequel to / new levels for "Catacombs" which was written by John Carmack (from issue #114), and there is third game Ether Quest (issue #134)
Re: (Score:2)
I had no idea it was a John Carmack work! Like I said, its been close to 30 years since I’d played it! Thank you so much!
Needs to have more older stuff. (Score:2)
It needs to incorporate bitsavers 'bits' for paper tape images and listings.
Also listings in BYTE, Kilobaud, Creative Computing etc.
Yes I am completely serious.