<
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2022/10/lost-something-search-through-91-7-million-files-from-the-80s-90s-and-2000s/>
"Today, tech archivist Jason Scott announced a new website called
Discmaster
that lets anyone search through 91.7 million vintage computer files pulled from
CD-ROM releases and floppy disks. The files include images, text documents,
music, games, shareware, videos, and much more.
Discmaster opens a window into digital media culture around the turn of the
millennium, turning anyone into a would-be digital archeologist. It's a rare
look into a slice of cultural history that is often obscured by the challenges
of obsolete media and file format incompatibilities.
The files on
Discmaster come from the Internet Archive, uploaded by thousands
of people over the years. The new site pulls them together behind a search
engine with the ability to perform detailed searches by file type, format,
source, file size, file date, and many other options.
"The value proposition is the value proposition of any freely accessible
research database," Scott told
Ars Technica. "People are enabled to do deep
dives into more history, reference their findings, and encourage others to look
in the same place."
Discmaster is the work of a group of anonymous history-loving programmers who
approached Scott to host it for them. 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.
For example, you can search for vintage music files—such as MIDI or even
digitized Amiga sounds—and listen to them directly in your browser without any
extra tools necessary. The same thing goes for early-90s low-resolution video
files, images in obscure formats, and various types of documents."
Via Christoph S.
Share and enjoy,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
