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I can see I'm going to need to clear things out a bit more often.
I've just done a bit of a sort through of my various "PC media" storage boxes. What I discovered would probably be invaluable to any electronic archivist, or archaeologist of late 1990s PC miscellanea. The total included:
* Two plastic bags worth of PC magazine discs[1], dating back at least 10 years or so.
* Various install CDs for outdated versions of Linux
* Two Australian phonediscs (phonebook on disc), probably from the late 1990s.
* Various MS software designed for Windows 3.11 (Encarta 95, MS Ancient Lands, and the tragically misnamed MS Works).
* Game CDs for games which came with my first personal PC (bought back in 1995 - these are games which were designed to run on Windows 3.11) as well as games purchased subsequently. Some of them are compilation CDs of multiple games from back in the bad old days of 5.25" floppy disks - thousands of games on the one CD because they were designed to fit into Kb of memory, not Mb.
* Manuals for most of these game CDs.
* Driver CDs for hardware which is now obsolete (or at least no longer in my posession).
* Demos of games which never made it to mass market (or if they did, bombed badly).
As I say, a digital archaeologist, electronic archivist, or computing historian may be able to make some use of these. I'm going to see which of the games I can get to run on the current PC, which ones the antivirus rejects as malware (for some reason, AVG doesn't like certain bits of the Sims 2, and it also pings up Settlers IV as malware as well), which ones aren't worth the disk space (probably most of them) and which ones still interest me after all these years.
The rest... well, the rest I'll probably bin. If there are any archaeologists, archivists, or historians who are interested in this stuff, do let me know.
[1] Explanation for those who weren't interested in computers in the late 1990s and early 2000s in Australia. Back then, we had what was probably the world's slowest internet connection[2] - most of the country was on dial-up, and at between 19 and 38 bps[3], it took a long time to download even the smallest software packages. The various popular computing magazines in this country took advantage of this by including with their magazine a CD (later, a DVD) loaded with various bits of demoware, freeware and shareware, as well as the occasional full copy of whatever they could find for either free or very cheap.
[2] Other digital archaeological fact: for a long time, Australia's internet connection with the rest of the world was effectively via sneakernet - mag tapes of the latest bits of Usenet etc loaded onto a regular jumbo flight between LA and Melbourne. As the old saying went: never underestimate the bandwidth of a 747 loaded with magtapes.
[3] Bits per second. Yes, bits. Singular.
I've just done a bit of a sort through of my various "PC media" storage boxes. What I discovered would probably be invaluable to any electronic archivist, or archaeologist of late 1990s PC miscellanea. The total included:
* Two plastic bags worth of PC magazine discs[1], dating back at least 10 years or so.
* Various install CDs for outdated versions of Linux
* Two Australian phonediscs (phonebook on disc), probably from the late 1990s.
* Various MS software designed for Windows 3.11 (Encarta 95, MS Ancient Lands, and the tragically misnamed MS Works).
* Game CDs for games which came with my first personal PC (bought back in 1995 - these are games which were designed to run on Windows 3.11) as well as games purchased subsequently. Some of them are compilation CDs of multiple games from back in the bad old days of 5.25" floppy disks - thousands of games on the one CD because they were designed to fit into Kb of memory, not Mb.
* Manuals for most of these game CDs.
* Driver CDs for hardware which is now obsolete (or at least no longer in my posession).
* Demos of games which never made it to mass market (or if they did, bombed badly).
As I say, a digital archaeologist, electronic archivist, or computing historian may be able to make some use of these. I'm going to see which of the games I can get to run on the current PC, which ones the antivirus rejects as malware (for some reason, AVG doesn't like certain bits of the Sims 2, and it also pings up Settlers IV as malware as well), which ones aren't worth the disk space (probably most of them) and which ones still interest me after all these years.
The rest... well, the rest I'll probably bin. If there are any archaeologists, archivists, or historians who are interested in this stuff, do let me know.
[1] Explanation for those who weren't interested in computers in the late 1990s and early 2000s in Australia. Back then, we had what was probably the world's slowest internet connection[2] - most of the country was on dial-up, and at between 19 and 38 bps[3], it took a long time to download even the smallest software packages. The various popular computing magazines in this country took advantage of this by including with their magazine a CD (later, a DVD) loaded with various bits of demoware, freeware and shareware, as well as the occasional full copy of whatever they could find for either free or very cheap.
[2] Other digital archaeological fact: for a long time, Australia's internet connection with the rest of the world was effectively via sneakernet - mag tapes of the latest bits of Usenet etc loaded onto a regular jumbo flight between LA and Melbourne. As the old saying went: never underestimate the bandwidth of a 747 loaded with magtapes.
[3] Bits per second. Yes, bits. Singular.
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