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Lost something? Search through 91.7 million files from the 80s, 90s, and 2000s :!marseyretro:

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2022/10/lost-something-search-through-91-7-million-files-from-the-80s-90s-and-2000s

Based. Not dramatic, but based. May also fit in /h/vidya.

http://discmaster.textfiles.com/

Orange Site:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33254791

:marseysnoo:

https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/y7kdqk/lost_something_search_through_917_million_files/?sort=controversial


Lost something? Search through 91.7 million files from the 80s, 90s, and 2000s | Ars Technica

The quest to save today’s gaming history from being lost forever

Discmaster opens a window into digital media culture around the turn of the millennium, turning anyone into a would-be digital archeologist. The files on Discmaster come from the Internet Archive, uploaded by thousands of people over the years. «The value proposition is the value proposition of any freely accessible research database,» Scott told Ars Technica. 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. In the Discmaster Twitter announcement thread, people are already using the service to rediscover programs they lost during the 1990s, rare BBS files, ZZT worlds, bitmap fonts, shareware they wrote 20-plus years ago, and vintage music software.

Enlarge / Using Discmaster, you can search through vintage stock photo CD-ROMs on many subjects. «It is probably, to me, one of the most important computer history research project opportunities that we've had in 10 years,» says Scott. «The they are choosing are very specifically compilation and presentation CD-ROMs, like the best shareware discs,» says Scott.

Thousands of DOS games have been added to the Internet Archive

Scott is no stranger to radical acts of digital archivism, having participated in backing up GeoCities, preserving Flash files, making thousands of MS-DOS games playable though a web browser, and more. Com, he's hosted archives of BBS files and CD-ROMs for almost two decades. But until now, those resources had never been searchable with the degree of precision that Discmaster allows. In 2005, he created Vintage Computing and Gaming.

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Wtf, Geocities was backed up? All that embarrassing shit I made as a teenager was supposed to have been lost to time.

Shit!

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