Discmaster (Experimental Archive)

Jason Scott has done it again: Discmaster is an experimental frontent to a subsection of content stored at archive.org and textfiles.com, specialized on CD, floppy, and BBS media of the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s. And it’s a throwback in more than one way, as the site itself is a time travel back to the days of Netscape Navigator 2.0 (it has <font> tags! I mean, font tags, really, like <font size="+1" color="Green">, and they still work in modern browsers!) Thanks to this, the site also works on legacy browsers, in theory even with some venerable browser software like Netscape 1.0 or NCSA Mosaic (a slight loss of functionality is to be expected.) Appropriately, there is no secure connection.

As for content, there are lots of disks that came with various computer magazines, like Amiga Format, Compute! Gazette, Run Magazine, Loadstar, and more in the “disks” section. All the disks and CDs may be browsed and drilled down, and files are converted to a convenient presentation, down to the actual BASIC texts of any programs. (Of course, you can download the binary files, as well.) There is also a search function which covers the entire collection and presents any found media in a suitable manner. – So, if you were always looking for this one program that was seemingly lost to time, there’s now a viable chance. And you may access this site actually from your retrocomputer.

http://discmaster.textfiles.com

(Image from Ars Technica, who give a much better description of this site here.)

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