Yeah it’s amazing that such a ‘pivotal’ piece of software was not only ‘lost’ but the author lost it as well….

And that is only one example because of a game, who knows how much other stuff is forever lost.

Yeah it is a shame such old things are being lost, esp ‘free software’ where a lot of us had a tendency to wipe old versions for new with little regard..

Another interesting observation is that plenty of old 3 1/2″ disks dont read anymore…. People holding onto the past are going to be shocked that their magnetic stashes are worthless… 🙁

What about Internet Archive? I heard they successfully lobbied for an exception to copyright law for the preservation purpose. Unfortunately you can’t know what they have in the archive. It’s not public atm. But they have very interesting archive of shareware CD’s, even if Textfiles.org archive seems to be bigger.

Btw, haven’t checked your site for some time. I rarely get time to play with oldies. 🙂

Digital dumpster diving for the future! Its a shame that so many things will be saved in such a strange manner… It sure would be nice to get access to every version of everything ever made but… that’ll never happen…

I guess another thing like falling out like old book copyright is that you could run all kinds of software for free, but at least we have the BSD/FSF stuff out there. Which is better than nothing but can’t do anything for people with binary data in old formats, or massively complicated systems like any Oracle solution.

I think what is sad is that MVS 3.8 for the IBM 370 is free, and open so mainframe enthusiasts at least have something, while DOS & OS/2 won’t seemingly be released because of intertwined contracts, nor because there is no real set expiration of the product..

Not to mention just trying to go to Microsoft or IBM for even thinking about buying say OS/2 1.21 if you wanted something that today would qualify for an embedded OS… Even OS/2 2.0 fits in some modern tight spaces…

Not to mention nobody ever seems to think about all the old data sitting in old files that will not open in newer programs which don’t install on modern OSes…

I’ve run into it in work with having to go through documentation stored in Word 2 format, so yeah you can see all the hoops I had to go through to get it into something modern word can read… Heck relying on the manufacturer to support 20+ year old formats seems to be somewhat unrealistic, after all they want to move upward and onward with their new products not dragging around ancient stuff (but thankfully old ASCII stuff is a good LCD).

I imagine it’ll become a bigger deal as the years go on, and various writers old machines will eventually want to be restored to read the old documents to be shared with everyone… I know Arthur C Clarke had written a great deal of stuff on various old machines that will no doubt be lost as like his biography won’t be published for some 90+ years from now and trying to read any of his works that are stored electronically will be impossible…

And I’m sure there will be plenty of other examples (Douglas Adams works, no doubt on those 400kb Macintosh floppy disks…) etc etc…

Even “small” stuff like family videos on old non BetaMax/VHS tapes… it sucks as media shifts leaving stuff behind, but worse when the vendor tries to make it impossible to copy stuff.

God knows that if there had been such a thing nowadays, I would have not wasted so much time dumpster diving…

An argument could be made that the current DRM, cloud, etc. technologies abuse the idea of copyright. Rather than releasing the content into the public domain after the copyright expires, there will be simply nothing left by the copyright expires. The copyright holder thus gets everything, the public nothing. But if that’s the case, why should the public grant copyright to greedy bastards who have no intention of ever giving anything back?