[HN Gopher] Bitsavers Software Archive (2022)
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Bitsavers Software Archive (2022)
Author : gballan
Score : 93 points
Date : 2023-06-26 08:37 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (bitsavers.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (bitsavers.org)
| sudobash1 wrote:
| > and.. the site looks this way for a reason, to leave it static
| and easy to mirror, so don't remind me that it looks like it's
| from 1995
|
| Nice. The software and documentation provided on this site isn't
| flashy or modern, so I see all the less reason for the website to
| be so.
| pjmlp wrote:
| In general, bitsavers is a treasure trove for computing
| archaeology.
|
| There is so much to learn about alternative computing realities,
| outside what was happening at Bell Labs.
|
| The two decades that predated UNIX, what was happening at Xerox,
| DEC, IBM, GE,..., while UNIX was being developed, and the early 8
| and 16 bit home computing.
|
| So many alternative realities and what ifs to discover.
| lockhouse wrote:
| I think a user friendly modern desktop OS built upon a
| foundation of OpenVMS would be amazing.
|
| Ultimately of what you listed I think the stuff developed at
| Xerox shaped modern computing the most. The rest of them
| focused too much on mainframes, minis, and backend enterprise
| computing instead of personal computing.
| masswerk wrote:
| I'd mention the DEC PDP-1: most of what is not batch
| processing and many software tools with some linage to things
| still used today starts there.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| I looked at the xerox/sdd folder constantly for my first book.
| If you want to know why the hardware was bit-sliced processors
| instead of a 68K or 8086, it's all right there.
| GTP wrote:
| What did Bitsavers do that was/is so interesting? A quick look on
| Wikipedia didn't turn out anything.
| hluska wrote:
| The site archives a lot of old content, from software to print
| that helped define many of our youths. As an example, I can go
| to Bitsavers and find copies of all the magazines that I used
| to read in my high school library in the 1990s.
|
| If you weren't alive (or into tech) back in the day, you might
| get a laugh out of some of the predictions. If you were
| alive/into tech, it's a place for nostalgia.
| kps wrote:
| Archive tens of thousands of documents.
| sillywalk wrote:
| 1000bit.it has some documentation plus a ton of old
| advertisments and brochures.
| unixhero wrote:
| There is also http://tenox.pdp-11.ru which archives and hoards
| tons of very old software.
|
| From the readme.html file:
|
| # Tenox Operating Systems Archive
|
| This is an archive of operating systems, firmware, drivers and
| documentation. We mostly focus on RISC systems of the 90s and
| early 2000s.
|
| ## Directory structure
|
| The main part of the archive is the /os directory that is sorted
| by operating system name. Each os subdirectory will have install
| media, apps and docs for that specific OS. For systems that have
| multiple names eg. `OSF/1`, `Dec Unix`, `Tru64`, we would name it
| from first to last, eg. `osf1-tru64`.
|
| The other top level directories like /apps /hw and /docs are for
| categories that do not fit with an OS. For example apps that run
| on multiple operating systems or docs for hardware that runs many
| OSes.
|
| ## Access information
|
| - http://osarchive.org
|
| - ftp://osarchive.org
|
| - rsync://osarchive.org/osarchive
|
| ## Public Mirrors
|
| - http://tenox.pdp-11.ru/
|
| ## Legal Status
|
| This site operates under a DMCA exemption for obsolete computer
| media and archives. For more info refer to:
|
| - https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2021/10/28/2021-23...
| - https://www.copyright.gov/1201/docs/1201_recommendation.pdf -
| https://www.copyright.gov/1201/docs/librarian_statement_01.h...
| dark-star wrote:
| Yes, Tenox's archive is awesome and you can find some very rare
| and interesting bits on there.
|
| But it is also terribly un-curated. Some directories look like
| someone just slapped a bunch of ZIP archives in there without
| checking. Some archives don't have version numbers at all,
| sometimes the version numbers are wrong, sometimes you end up
| with three archives containing the same disk images just in
| different formats.
|
| Still, it'S the best place to find rare and unexpected things,
| so I can definitely recommend it, if you have enough time to do
| the sorting/curating yourself
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| I'm surprised they don't make a torrent available, instead of
| encouraging users to rsync the entire site.
| ssl232 wrote:
| Can files included in a torrent be updated after the fact? I
| guess the issue is the archive is constantly growing and rsync
| deals with that gracefully.
| kevincox wrote:
| No, but if you point the new torrent at an old data directory
| it should skip downloading the existing data.
|
| Although you will only download from people on the same
| version as you.
|
| IPFS us probably a better fit here as content will be
| downloaded from anyone who has it even cross-version. IPNS
| could also be used for distributing updates.
| v64 wrote:
| Don't quote me on it, but I think this would be possible with
| v2 of the protocol. Changes were made so that file hashes are
| also part of the protocol (in addition to piece hashes), so
| versions of the torrent with added files would not change the
| hashes of the existing files, enabling users with older
| versions of the torrent metadata to still join the current
| swarm and get information on the new files.
| londons_explore wrote:
| This is the case, but with fairly severe caveats. There is
| no way for a client who wants to download a dead/unhealthy
| torrent to find other healthier torrents containing the
| same file(s).
|
| You'd need some kind of central torrent directory to be
| able to do this, because the DHT has no way to search for
| torrents containing a file hash.
|
| Torrent swarms still aren't a good way to do distributed
| archiving.
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(page generated 2023-06-26 23:02 UTC)