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Hey, let's talk about a curated archive

Plasma said:
Anecdotes are nice, but the vast majority of people on this forum are guys over 30 for a reason.
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In my case it's because of the passage of time. I got my Apple Lisa from my high school in the mid-'90s --- I was 15 or so, and I had learned about them by reading alt.folklore.computers and searching the web for more about computers I'd never heard of. I had never used a Lisa or seen one in real life before I got my hands on mine.

My family got into computing pretty late, so even though I'm old enough for the 8-bits, I never used them at home. (Apple IIs in school only.) I'm not too nostalgic for the PCs or Macs that I did use a little bit later. My collection today has a bunch of machines that I'd never had even the remotest connection with in the past --- Tektronix 4050 series, the Whitechapel MG-1, the transputers, that blankety-blank PERQ that I'm trying to get working, the IBM 5100; I like them all because they are technically interesting and because the people and stories behind them are interesting too. It's fun to me to see the bits of their ideas that made it into modern computing --- and to daydream "what if" about the bits that didn't.

I'm still pretty unusual now and definitely was an outlier in the mid-'90s, but there are ways to get into the hobby that aren't based on fond memories of personal experience. The machines can be pretty interesting all by themselves.
 
In point of fact, while I think studying the old machines (really old, like yours truly) is very entertaining and potentially useful, I have no delusions about sitting at a keypunch, mounting tapes and hoping for the best. :)
 
silicontare said:
Retro gaming is beloved by numerous age groups, with PS1, N64, and early 3D PC games being among some of the most popular picks that are still discussed and played today. I come across reels on Instagram with people younger than me discussing games and hardware that were before my time.
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I feel like retro video games are really a separate thing from vintage computing, other than the overlap inherent in the fact that you need a vintage computer (or computer-like object) to run a vintage video game on the original hardware. Old video games are easily accessible to anyone, between emulators (both homebrew and official channels), off the shelf retro consoles (that are of course almost always emulators), and companies like GoG that rerelease old video games with massaged installers and other tweaks to make them run on modern PCs. Undoubtedly some of the kids that are into them get hooked on them by their dad dusting off the old NES or PS1, but I would bet a lot of them come into it from the other direction, IE, they play the games in an emulator and then get interested in seeing it on the original hardware.

The simple fact is that people enjoy playing simple games, not everything is improved by throwing more CPU cycles at it. Humans spend millions of hours playing pointless Bejeweled-type puzzle games on their phones that, other than having more impressive sound and graphics special effects when you make a match, could play identically on hardware from 1980's. Titles like Pac Man, Breakout, and Galaxian are still objectively good games despite pushing 50 in some cases, because the gameplay is fun, straightforward, and there's nothing about it that's really improved by pumping up the number of pixels. I mean, people haven't stopped playing the original chess because the pieces are terrible representations of queens and knights and you don't get to actually watch the pieces murder each other after every move. (They tried that with Battle Chess and, frankly, it got old *real* fast. It's a concept that looks cool on the big screen when it's holographic monsters clubbing the snot out of each other on the card table on the Millennium Falcon, but in the real world it's pretty dull.)

I mean, sure, maybe the popularity of retrogaming acts as something of a support framework for the retro-computing hobby, but on the dark side I think it also invites the most scrutiny in terms of criticisms like piracy because, yes, old games still objectively have wide-ranging appeal. And when something has wide-ranging appeal that's a value proposition for anyone able to make people pay to for the privilege... which means that any kind of oldschool software archive that caters to gaming is inherently setting up conflict with commercial interests that still technically have the right to make people pay for that stuff for the next half century. This is in fact one of the reasons why I rolled my eyes so hard when I was reading BetaArchive's "how to contribute" page; it was *ALL ABOUT* how to make a perfect ripoff and CD scan of exactly the kind of only-a-decade-old game you can buy on GoG or steam for a few bucks. You can whine about how copyrights are too long, but there's a distinct difference between archiving software for extinct computers from the 1970's and making that freely available and that, and thus I feel like you have no choice but to at least try to erect a firewall between these two things. If it's still for sale it's not "Abandonware". Full stop.

Best case I guess I hope that some of these kids that fall in love with oldschool games and find their way into buying an old PC or Apple II to experience it on the real thing get hooked enough to want to learn more about the technologies that made them all possible, but honestly... I think playing the games is where most of them are going to stop. It'd be nice to be wrong.
 
The generation thing is potentially useful as a guideline, but not everyone comes from a same place. In my place having any 486 in 1995 was top notch but I mean king-style. From some other posts I gathered I'm of same age as OP, I was totally exposed to XTs and 5 25 10 years after their time because everything better was inaccessible. And I was one of the lucky ones, having an actual PC for myself, because the norm was C64.

So I wouldn't say older technologies are not interesting to somebody, maybe they were slightly exposed to them, or just curious what was before their time.

Eudimorphodon said:
I feel like retro video games are really a separate thing from vintage computing, other than the overlap inherent in the fact that you need a vintage computer (or computer-like object) to run a vintage video game on the original hardware. Old video games are easily accessible to anyone, between emulators (both homebrew and official channels), off the shelf retro consoles (that are of course almost always emulators), and companies like GoG that rerelease old video games with massaged installers and other tweaks to make them run on modern PCs. Undoubtedly some of the kids that are into them get hooked on them by their dad dusting off the old NES or PS1, but I would bet a lot of them come into it from the other direction, IE, they play the games in an emulator and then get interested in seeing it on the original hardware.

The simple fact is that people enjoy playing simple games, not everything is improved by throwing more CPU cycles at it. Humans spend millions of hours playing pointless Bejeweled-type puzzle games on their phones that, other than having more impressive sound and graphics special effects when you make a match, could play identically on hardware from 1980's. Titles like Pac Man, Breakout, and Galaxian are still objectively good games despite pushing 50 in some cases, because the gameplay is fun, straightforward, and there's nothing about it that's really improved by pumping up the number of pixels. I mean, people haven't stopped playing the original chess because the pieces are terrible representations of queens and knights and you don't get to actually watch the pieces murder each other after every move. (They tried that with Battle Chess and, frankly, it got old *real* fast. It's a concept that looks cool on the big screen when it's holographic monsters clubbing the snot out of each other on the card table on the Millennium Falcon, but in the real world it's pretty dull.)

I mean, sure, maybe the popularity of retrogaming acts as something of a support framework for the retro-computing hobby, but on the dark side I think it also invites the most scrutiny in terms of criticisms like piracy because, yes, old games still objectively have wide-ranging appeal. And when something has wide-ranging appeal that's a value proposition for anyone able to make people pay to for the privilege... which means that any kind of oldschool software archive that caters to gaming is inherently setting up conflict with commercial interests that still technically have the right to make people pay for that stuff for the next half century. This is in fact one of the reasons why I rolled my eyes so hard when I was reading BetaArchive's "how to contribute" page; it was *ALL ABOUT* how to make a perfect ripoff and CD scan of exactly the kind of only-a-decade-old game you can buy on GoG or steam for a few bucks. You can whine about how copyrights are too long, but there's a distinct difference between archiving software for extinct computers from the 1970's and making that freely available and that, and thus I feel like you have no choice but to at least try to erect a firewall between these two things. If it's still for sale it's not "Abandonware". Full stop.
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I'm usually the fuck the copyrights guy, but I can side with the authors here. A game has meaning in itself and it was created for somebody to enjoy while paying the creator. If there's a legit GOG download there's no justification to rip the original CDs and share them freely. It means author absolutely did not abandon the brand but found a home for it.
 
Plasma said:
Ok, but why aren't you interested in reacquiring that stuff? Instead you are very focused in the late 90s/early 2000s. I'm guessing there is a reason for that.

Nostalgia is not the only factor in this hobby, but it is significant. This is not unique to vintage computing; for example classic cars are on a similar trajectory. Yes, there will always be some younger people interested, but it's trending downward over time.
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Can I answer this instead?
Because I hated them back in the day. Them, the 3.5 ones, and the CDs and the DVDs.

I couldn't wait to get rid of all those media, still remember setting up a 1MB ramdrive on a 4MB ram machine in DOS and being in awe just moving files around.
 
Eudimorphodon said:
And when something has wide-ranging appeal that's a value proposition for anyone able to make people pay to for the privilege...
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The real problem here is the game companies being too caught up on "must stop piracy" and failing to recognize the untapped revenue potential of the vintage computing market.

Imagine: we're already selling the game on Steam for a buck. And its up on 8 different software archives for free download. Why not sell the .iso file for a buck so those of us who want real ownership of the game can actually buy it?

Its a small market, but getting set up to cater to it would cost practically nothing and function as a turkey revenue stream once complete.

Zare said:
I'm usually the fuck the copyrights guy, but I can side with the authors here. A game has meaning in itself and it was created for somebody to enjoy while paying the creator. If there's a legit GOG download there's no justification to rip the original CDs and share them freely. It means author absolutely did not abandon the brand but found a home for it.
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Only problem here is you can't generally play the GoG version on a retro PC.

But there is a fine solution: buy it GoG and then download the rip. Everyone wins. The developer gets money, you get the retro game. Better than buying a used copy on eBay if that's your stance.
 
Zare said:
So I wouldn't say older technologies are not interesting to somebody, maybe they were slightly exposed to them, or just curious what was before their time.
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I foresee in the not real distant future a subculture of even using retro software to achieve things. Not because its better but to experience what it was like to do it back in the day. Like editing videos in ancient versions of Premier to compare then and now.
 
hunterjwizzard said:
Only problem here is you can't generally play the GoG version on a retro PC.
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Games that I have in my acc I can, DOS stuff runs Dosbox, so you just pull the files out to your old PC. The games that ran on Windows run on Windows and will run on any other older Windows, like King's Bounty which is 7-era or some other games I have there that are in XP era.
Actually GOG versions are the source of a lot of 'aftermarket' launchers or user mods or addons. As GOG versions tend to be 'ultimate' versions of the game. Example the Heroes 2 modern opensource engine I talked about, you need og game files, and the ones from GOG release are usually the source.
 
Iiiiiiiiiiinteresting. I will have to try that. There's a fair number of games I own on GoG that I can't/haven't found original roms for. How's late win98 stuff manage?
 
Back to the actual topic at hand - if I were secretly constructing such an archive, would people rather have software grouped by year or by family? EG if a 1999 game had a sequel in 2002, should those go together even though technically the later game belongs to a different era of computing?
 
Both. Both games belong to the same franchise, but different years. Not a different "era of computing" if you base that on an arbitrary cut-off year.

For games specifically, check out MobyGames as a reference. Not much better you can get, I think.
 
hunterjwizzard said:
Iiiiiiiiiiinteresting. I will have to try that. There's a fair number of games I own on GoG that I can't/haven't found original roms for. How's late win98 stuff manage?
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Well I don't thing GOG does anything special, they use the tech already existing.
There's nGlide driver which covers Voodoo translation to DirectX so you don't have to use ancient DirectX in the games.
 
Zare said:
Well I don't thing GOG does anything special, they use the tech already existing.
There's nGlide driver which covers Voodoo translation to DirectX so you don't have to use ancient DirectX in the games.
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For voodoo games I use my actual Voodoo3 system. I've tried those games with the nGlide driver and they look pretty much identical to how they played on my 433mhz celeron with software rendering back in 1998.

But it'll be nice to try out some of the other classics on period hardware.

Svenska said:
Both. Both games belong to the same franchise, but different years. Not a different "era of computing" if you base that on an arbitrary cut-off year.
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I am doing an arbitrary cutoff but its by system. EG windows 98 should run anything from 1995 to 2000(yes it can do older and newer but that's not the point of my archive that will probably never be seen by anyone but me). Then XP covers 2001-2010, which is a big range but it makes sense. Still splitting the archive into five-year chunks.

But I'll keep era-spanning franchises together. I think that's important.

Svenska said:
For games specifically, check out MobyGames as a reference. Not much better you can get, I think.
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I like mobygames in principle but keep hitting a wall where they don't want me to browse anymore until I give them something. Better than BetaArchive I guess but somewhat less valuable as a resource if you don't already know what you're looking for.
 
This thread evolved into something less useful than intended (IMHO).

What would be useful is a set of meta-data to be added to files or whole directories which can help finding stuff. A small set of data like brand, model name, year, type or record (photo, disk image documentation, ...) in a more or less standard format.

This data can be retrieved and form the basis for an index to be used by a search engine.

Maybe it is useful to start with a small pilot and try to figure out what could work. A useful first step could be the essential set of meta-data.

Fred Jan
 
Actually the original intention of this thread was to put together a list of obsolete software that might be interesting to look at.

I did stumble across a few old favorites last night: early copies of Poser and Bryce. These were consumer-grade 3D programs from the mid-90s. Both are still around, Poser is even still getting updates. Why are these excellent choices for a curated archive? Because they are simple and intuitive, and do something a little cooler than Microsoft Word.
 
hunterjwizzard said:
but that's not the point of my archive that will probably never be seen by anyone but me
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I think we can stop the discussion at this point. You do your personal archive the way you like, as do I.

For games, Mobygames is likely the best location for metadata. Actual data must live elsewhere.
For BIOS chips and mainboard data sheets, TheRetroWeb is a great starting point.
For PC operating systems and productivity software, WinWorldPC does great in my opinion.
For Mac stuff, there's Macintosh Garden, but I don't know much about it (might be a mixed quality bag).
For really old documents, there's Bitsavers, which could use a separate search engine / index to better find things.

In other words, we have lots of curated, decently high-quality archives. Instead of replicating them, we should:
a) improve them wherever possible and
b) backup them in case they ever go down.
 
I think this is what AI was made for. Just grab everything and pump it into a giant ingestor and then you can ask it questions all day long.

If not that what the he!! was AI made for?

Also, I'm on the side of this going the way of model trains (which I've talked about here before). If you didn't live the era then your interest in it is pretty miniscule. Even though I was a real gearhead when I was a kid (broke gearhead, unfortunately) I was never interested in any vehicle made before I was born.

With exceptions of course - People still collect rotary dial telephones, people still make swords, I bet somewhere there's someone making wagon wheels, etc.

In our day (massive generalization there - I think we skew almost exclusively between 50 and 80) computers were absolutely revolutionary. Nobody born after 1980 has ever used anything other than MACs and PC's and probably don't know just how many computers surround them. I imagine my washing machine has more MIPS than an Imsai.
 
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