Wanted to give you all a bit of a head's up on a very cool new section of the site that will be rolling out soon. For right now it's simply going to called, "Files."
For years now I've had this curious obsession with collecting certain disk collections. I classify them like this:
- Public Domain disk collections. Generally purchased via mail-order (e.g. DevWare) - but not Fred Fish since that archive can be found elsewhere. It's not exactly easy to browse, but it's not impossible. I focus on the lesser-known ones.
- User Group disks. Generally a single disk once per month. These were usually branded by city. (e.g. Sacramento, Tampa Bay, Memphis, etc.)
- Disk Mags. These were similar to Public Domain disks, but were usually found on or near magazine racks. These didn't even have magazines... they were sold as monthly batches of disks.
- Shareware or Freeware. Loose disks sold as one-offs usually with a single program. Remember, this was pre-internet and not everyone had a modem to try and download software off of bulletin board systems, Compuserve or whatever. An example disk here might be SuperHack (1992) by Ron Haines, or AmiDock, by Gary Knight.
For the most part almost none of the disks/collections I'm talking about have ever been archived online in any way shape or form. For one thing they are very difficult to find (and when you do find them, you usually have to pay for them). For another, making them easily searchable and downloadable online is a LOT of work!
With my personal collection, which I've spent a lot of time and money putting together and continue to do so, I am eager to make these available to the public. None of the software I'll be adding here will be under any kind of copyright. Remember, most of this is either public domain, user group disks or "abandonware" - none of which I'll be making any money off of. It's purely a sharing thing. For the stand-alone disks with programs (e.g. IconMaster, AmiDock, etc.) I'm not asking for any money in return nor are there ads on the site. If anyone ever asks me to pull them down I certainly will do so.
I'm sure some folks will almost instantly ask (or demand) why I'm not uploading all of my collection to Aminet or Archive.org. And the answers are: because 1) this is stuff I bought with my own money and have decided to share how I see fit and 2) I'm creating a system of browsing the collections that far exceeds anything other platforms provide.
In any case, when you see this arrive in the near future, it will look rather thin. That's because I'll have to add each and every disk one at at time - and some disk mag issues are 3 disks deep each. So it's going to be a "forever task" in the background. But it's going to be very, very cool over time.
