The Internet Archive Changing Computer History with Largest Software Collection on Earth

0

internet-archive

The Internet Archive has been expanding its collection of historical software. The initiative has collaboration from independent archives FTP site boneyard, the TOSEC archive, Shareware CD Archive and the Disk Drives collection. Having achieved a lot in archiving books, websites and music, the Archive embarked on collecting terabytes of software from the last 50 years. Software documentation, including over 10,000 issues of computer magazines and journals will also form part of the project.

According to Jason Scott, the man in charge of the project, “There is now a fully-accessible, worldwide-reachable, massive-bandwidth and completely unrestricted collection of computer history up right now, in these collections I’ve just mentioned. Some are mirrors of incredible projects that have been around long before this moment, and let me not diminish their continued work. But some of these efforts needed that little extra bit of access, that ease of reading and downloading, and now that is here. The URLs on archive.org are designed to be permanent.”

Jason_Scott_at_Internet_Archive
Jason Scott at The Internet Archive

Some issues with the collection is that, the content does not have enough meta-data. This makes for a messy search when you are looking for a particular item. Right now, the collection is a crate digger’s but Scott promises that a lot of work will still go into the endeavor. Read more from Jason Scott’s blog.