❄️ ’Tis the season to celebrate with Sierra On-Line’s 1986 "A Computer Christmas." ❄️ Thanks to #softwarepreservation, this retro holiday classic is now a perennial gift for new generations of holiday revelers. 🎄
See all the animated sequences ⤵️
https://archive.org/details/sierra-christmas-card-1986
#FollowerPower / #BoostsWelcome :boost_ok:
Does someone in the #SoftwarePreservation circles here want to dump and preserve the original retail release #firmware for an #Iridium #9555A satellite Phone?
anyone else remember the html code you could add from icq to show your on/offline status on your homepage 😅
source:
https://web.archive.org/web/19980212183219/http://www.icq.com/respondpanel/
today's buried treasure:
an interview with john henry thompson on the history of Macromedia Director. it's one of the only interviews ever recorded on the subject.
as the lead programmer and creator of Lingo - the OO scripting language used in director - he relates intimate knowledge of its origins. i was delighted to learn that he borrowed much of the grammar from Hypertalk!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TqISbaJ7qug
#macintosh #vintageApple #macromedia #softwarePreservation #programming
bbs enthusiasts might remember the name Telegard - a bbs server written based on wwiv's source code and hugely popular with the ibm pc/ms-dos crowd
telegard had a long and tumultuous history by its authors, and its own source was eventually leaked and was modded into many more popular (pirate-friendly) ms-dos boards like Renegade, Oblivion and Iniquity.
while i was doing research a few months ago on the history of those systems, i found out that telegard.net - the original home of tg - was taken over by a domain squatter in 2010, populated with ads for the past 15 years.
two months ago, i noticed that the squatter had not renewed the domain, and it went into the long grace/redemption/auction/expiry cycle. i checked on it every single morning, and to my absolute delight, it was released this morning for purchase. 💸
the domain will be used purely for historical preservation of telegard and its many descendants
update: restored the old site from the WBM archived version to https://telegard.net
TIL a toy company released a line of Independence Day toys in the late 90s; each toy included a different "mission disk" floppy with a multimedia program on it for windows 3.1
toy collector @eisnerguy1 managed to collect all 11 of the toys and uploaded disk images to IA 🙏
https://archive.org/details/iD4_Independence_Day_Mission_Disks
SIMP_SND.DLL contains every sound used in the berkeley systems simpsons after dark screensaver
it turns out to be a long chain of unsigned 8-bit RIFF waveform 11025hz files
extracted here for your pleasure
til about japan's Nifty-Serve online service, which was designed to be japan's answer to CompuServe.
while renown for its online forums, i was impressed to see that it was also a shareware distribution service. you could pay for and download registered versions of utilities and games, and the creators were paid directly by nifty.
while the service shut down in 2006, it was revived for one year as a museum of sorts for people to login and poke around. there was even an iOS app.
did anyone happen to archive a copy of the app?
https://web.archive.org/web/20110721053135/http://www.appbank.net/2011/07/20/iphone-application/278566.php
it originally was downloadable here - if that helps to track it down:
http://itunes.apple.com/jp/app/id447556735?mt=8
as promised, the treasure trove of US Robotics dialup ISP software is now available on IA. Please note that while I've done my best to describe the software, none of it has been tested. If you're planning on doing something like firmware upgrades, be 100% sure it's the right equipment and firmware.
and if you're one of those lucky 9 people that has a USR Total Control device, i'd love to hear your results.
USR Total Control SNMP Manager MIBs:
https://archive.org/details/tc-mibs
US Robotics SNMP Total Control Manager 2.0.1 and 4.13 Upgrade DIsks
https://archive.org/details/usr-tc-nmc-snmp
COM/US Robotics Total Control NetServer 8/16 Manager and Utilities
https://archive.org/details/usr-tc-netserver8-manager
US Robotics Total Control Modem Pool 8/16 Firmware:
https://archive.org/details/usr-tc-mp16-firmware
Novell NetWare Services Manager 1.1
https://archive.org/details/novell-nsm-1.1
US Robotics Total Control SNMP Manager for NetWare NMS:
https://archive.org/details/usr-tc-snmp-extras
US Robotics Modem Software Downloader 1.7 & USR Sportster Modem Firmware upgrade
https://archive.org/details/usr-sportster-upgrader
US robotics hardware upgrade offer document for dial-up ISPs. This is just a marketing document, but it's a fun read:
https://archive.org/details/usr-x2-offer
i just ftp'd into a public ftp server running in Ecuador, and discovered an absolutely critical piece of US Robotics ISP modem pool software that has been missing for 20 years
thank you from the bottom of my heart, rolando felix of Educational Unit 10 De Agosto, for leaving your departmental computer ftp wide open ❤️ you just preserved some insanely useful and important dial-up ISP history. (don't worry rolando - i didn't peek too deeply into your ms-dos games and music folders)
the story:
in the mid-90s i was a teenager who had a summer job at a dial-up isp. we had 32 incoming lines which were handled by 32 external USR Courier modems, which were fed into a super chonky Livingston Portmaster terminal server. all of the support hardware took up an entire rack - just to let 32 people call in for internet service at 28.8kbaud. it ate a ton of power, and made a lot of heat.
then, in 95-96, US Robotics delivered two insane appliances: the Total Control Modem Pool. these were *tiny* devices that offered 16 dial-up modems at 33.6kbaud. if you paid a bit more, you could buy the NetServer version, which gave you a terminal server too. an entire isp in a box the size of a network switch.
the modems had buggy firmware. so USR offered firmware updates via their ftp site. you could even upgrade some of the modems to "x2" 56k service with a firmware patch. they supported it for years, and when 3com bought USR, they kept the ftp site running for years. and then, 3com shut down their ftp site. and no one thought to mirror it.
after 3 hours of searching, i was able to track down a single filename thanks to WBM: mpv90an.zip. not a single site on the web had it - not even IA or discmaster. on a hunch, i plugged it into the Napalm FTP Indexer (https://www.searchftps.net) and... unbelievably, there it was, sitting on an ancient box in someone's university office in Quito, Ecuador.
the most amazing part was how slow the server was. at 250 ms pings, it was like digging through a public ftp on a 14.4k modem in 1994.
tomorrow i'll be uploading these files to IA. for now, sleep.
way back in 2017, jackson lango started writing a dev log about his passion project: an ascii/ansi adventure called Terminal Rain.
i was instantly in love with his lighting and animation. in an era overloaded with knockoff cyberpunk aesthetics, he had a keen eye for atmosphere and mood
it broke my heart when the blog went defunct a year later, and then disappeared entirely by 2020. waybackmachine sadly didn't archive any of his artwork.
these two images are the only surviving examples of his game as it existed back then.
if you were a kid in the 90s or early 2000s, you very likely goofed around with some of this educational software at school, or if your parents hated you sufficiently, at home.
a few months ago someone generously sent me an educational software catalog that their father - who was a teacher - had kept from the 90s. i finally got around to scanning it in, and now you too can goggle at the insane prices schools had to pay for multi-seat game licenses.
this is the catalog your teachers browsed in the summer, before unsuccessfully trying to convince the principal to lay down $495 for an Incredible Machine 3 lab pack.
(fwiw, does anyone really trust an edutainment company that can't spell brussels sprouts?)
pdf and original (400 dpi) scans here:
https://archive.org/details/software-plus-1996
#softwarePreservation #digiPres #retroComputing #retroGaming #edutainment
while i despise scroll-based article formats, this html5 article on the history of VB is 👍👍
over the years i've become more interested in game/software ephemera than the software itself.
for example, few people under 20 have grown up with a local computer store or brick & mortar store that sells boxed games. biking over to the computer store to line up, pay cash, and buy a game you've been saving for months has become an alien experience.
a few days ago i bought some old PC boxed games from a guy that had them in storage for decades. of all of them, i was the least excited about Millionaire. it looked like the kind of lazy portware that probably started its life as a text simulation on the Apple II and made its way to every godforsaken architecture.
tucked away on the last page of the manual was an absolute treasure: the original VISA transaction record for the day the game was bought, for $52.88, on July 20, 1985 at the Real Canadian Superstore in Edmonton, AB, Canada. This is before Canada had the goods and services tax (GST), and when Alberta was abbreviated to Alta.
the owner stapled it on to the warranty registration card, just in case he had to return it or RMA it some day.
Superstore #1572 is still there, in the north end. while i knew they had always sold video games, i had no idea that they sold IBM XT software way back in 1985.
(for anyone not in Canada, Superstore is a national discount grocery chain.)
even better, no one under the age of 30 will have seen these credit card transaction records. they were made using a "credit card imprinter" - a sliding mechanism that pressed the card number through several layers of invoice and carbon copy paper. The invoice papers were usually two or three layered - a white and pink copy for the business, and a yellow copy went to the customer.
TIL GeoWorks - the graphical environment for the rest of us - had a shareware edition. it was $10, and let you use anything, except you couldn't save your data.
is this the only existing shareware OS?
thank you to @floppyarchaeology for scanning in the materials and imaging the install floppies
We are happy to share the preprint and slides of the paper "The Medley Interlisp Project: Reviving a Historical Software System" by Eleanor Young et al.:
https://interlisp.org/documentation/young-ccece2025.pdf
https://interlisp.org/documentation/young-ccece2025-slides.pdf
It tells the first 5 years of the Medley Interlisp Project and discusses what other historical software recovery groups can learn from our experience. The paper was presented at IEEE CCEECE 2025 in Vancouver and accepted for publication.
Resurrecting Sinistar: A Cyber-Archaeology Documentary
I tuned in for a nostalgic visit to a game that I loved playing (that I also found mildly terrifying).
What I didn't expect-- but was thrilled to also experience was-- the journey of self-learning, community collaboration, and a bit of the retro game mod process.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCuoUSDBVac
GH Repo: https://github.com/synamaxmusic/sinistar
Playable via InternetArchive: https://archive.org/details/arcade_sinistar_synamax
i noticed that John Broomhall's exceptionally creepy X-COM UFO Defense soundtrack for the (surprisingly good) PSX port didn't have a lossless version available anywhere.
that has been now rectified:
https://archive.org/details/x-com-ufo-defense-ost-psx
extended digipres info for anyone interested:
weirdly, binchunker couldn't extract the redbook audio tracks from the PSX cd (even in psx mode), and every track had to be manually imported into audacity as raw audio. if anyone has to do this again, the correct settings for import are: Signed 16-bit PCM/Stereo/Little-Endian/44100hz
On May 28, 2025 Eleanor Young will give the talk "The Medley Interlisp Project: Reviving a Historical Software System" at the 2025 IEEE Canadian Conference on Electrical and Computer Engineering and Industry Summit (CCECE). She will discuss what other historical software recovery groups can learn from the Medley Interlisp Project.
