i just ftp'd into a public ftp server running in Ecuador, and discovered an absolutely critical piece of US Robotics ISP modem pool software that has been missing for 20 years

thank you from the bottom of my heart, rolando felix of Educational Unit 10 De Agosto, for leaving your departmental computer ftp wide open you just preserved some insanely useful and important dial-up ISP history. (don't worry rolando - i didn't peek too deeply into your ms-dos games and music folders)

the story:
in the mid-90s i was a teenager who had a summer job at a dial-up isp. we had 32 incoming lines which were handled by 32 external USR Courier modems, which were fed into a super chonky Livingston Portmaster terminal server. all of the support hardware took up an entire rack - just to let 32 people call in for internet service at 28.8kbaud. it ate a ton of power, and made a lot of heat.

then, in 95-96, US Robotics delivered two insane appliances: the Total Control Modem Pool. these were *tiny* devices that offered 16 dial-up modems at 33.6kbaud. if you paid a bit more, you could buy the NetServer version, which gave you a terminal server too. an entire isp in a box the size of a network switch.

the modems had buggy firmware. so USR offered firmware updates via their ftp site. you could even upgrade some of the modems to "x2" 56k service with a firmware patch. they supported it for years, and when 3com bought USR, they kept the ftp site running for years. and then, 3com shut down their ftp site. and no one thought to mirror it.

after 3 hours of searching, i was able to track down a single filename thanks to WBM: mpv90an.zip. not a single site on the web had it - not even IA or discmaster. on a hunch, i plugged it into the Napalm FTP Indexer (https://www.searchftps.net) and... unbelievably, there it was, sitting on an ancient box in someone's university office in Quito, Ecuador.

the most amazing part was how slow the server was. at 250 ms pings, it was like digging through a public ftp on a 14.4k modem in 1994.

tomorrow i'll be uploading these files to IA. for now, sleep.

way back in 2017, jackson lango started writing a dev log about his passion project: an ascii/ansi adventure called Terminal Rain.

i was instantly in love with his lighting and animation. in an era overloaded with knockoff cyberpunk aesthetics, he had a keen eye for atmosphere and mood

it broke my heart when the blog went defunct a year later, and then disappeared entirely by 2020. waybackmachine sadly didn't archive any of his artwork.

these two images are the only surviving examples of his game as it existed back then.

if you were a kid in the 90s or early 2000s, you very likely goofed around with some of this educational software at school, or if your parents hated you sufficiently, at home.

a few months ago someone generously sent me an educational software catalog that their father - who was a teacher - had kept from the 90s. i finally got around to scanning it in, and now you too can goggle at the insane prices schools had to pay for multi-seat game licenses.

this is the catalog your teachers browsed in the summer, before unsuccessfully trying to convince the principal to lay down $495 for an Incredible Machine 3 lab pack.

(fwiw, does anyone really trust an edutainment company that can't spell brussels sprouts?)

pdf and original (400 dpi) scans here:

https://archive.org/details/software-plus-1996

while i despise scroll-based article formats, this html5 article on the history of VB is

https://retool.com/visual-basic

over the years i've become more interested in game/software ephemera than the software itself.

for example, few people under 20 have grown up with a local computer store or brick & mortar store that sells boxed games. biking over to the computer store to line up, pay cash, and buy a game you've been saving for months has become an alien experience.

a few days ago i bought some old PC boxed games from a guy that had them in storage for decades. of all of them, i was the least excited about Millionaire. it looked like the kind of lazy portware that probably started its life as a text simulation on the Apple II and made its way to every godforsaken architecture.

tucked away on the last page of the manual was an absolute treasure: the original VISA transaction record for the day the game was bought, for $52.88, on July 20, 1985 at the Real Canadian Superstore in Edmonton, AB, Canada. This is before Canada had the goods and services tax (GST), and when Alberta was abbreviated to Alta.

the owner stapled it on to the warranty registration card, just in case he had to return it or RMA it some day.

Superstore #1572 is still there, in the north end. while i knew they had always sold video games, i had no idea that they sold IBM XT software way back in 1985.

(for anyone not in Canada, Superstore is a national discount grocery chain.)

even better, no one under the age of 30 will have seen these credit card transaction records. they were made using a "credit card imprinter" - a sliding mechanism that pressed the card number through several layers of invoice and carbon copy paper. The invoice papers were usually two or three layered - a white and pink copy for the business, and a yellow copy went to the customer.

TIL GeoWorks - the graphical environment for the rest of us - had a shareware edition. it was $10, and let you use anything, except you couldn't save your data.

is this the only existing shareware OS?

thank you to @floppyarchaeology for scanning in the materials and imaging the install floppies

https://archive.org/details/geoworks-working-model/

We are happy to share the preprint and slides of the paper "The Medley Interlisp Project: Reviving a Historical Software System" by Eleanor Young et al.:

https://interlisp.org/documentation/young-ccece2025.pdf

https://interlisp.org/documentation/young-ccece2025-slides.pdf

It tells the first 5 years of the Medley Interlisp Project and discusses what other historical software recovery groups can learn from our experience. The paper was presented at IEEE CCEECE 2025 in Vancouver and accepted for publication.

Resurrecting Sinistar: A Cyber-Archaeology Documentary

I tuned in for a nostalgic visit to a game that I loved playing (that I also found mildly terrifying).

What I didn't expect-- but was thrilled to also experience was-- the journey of self-learning, community collaboration, and a bit of the retro game mod process.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCuoUSDBVac

GH Repo: https://github.com/synamaxmusic/sinistar
Playable via InternetArchive: https://archive.org/details/arcade_sinistar_synamax

i noticed that John Broomhall's exceptionally creepy X-COM UFO Defense soundtrack for the (surprisingly good) PSX port didn't have a lossless version available anywhere.

that has been now rectified:
https://archive.org/details/x-com-ufo-defense-ost-psx

extended digipres info for anyone interested:
weirdly, binchunker couldn't extract the redbook audio tracks from the PSX cd (even in psx mode), and every track had to be manually imported into audacity as raw audio. if anyone has to do this again, the correct settings for import are: Signed 16-bit PCM/Stereo/Little-Endian/44100hz

On May 28, 2025 Eleanor Young will give the talk "The Medley Interlisp Project: Reviving a Historical Software System" at the 2025 IEEE Canadian Conference on Electrical and Computer Engineering and Industry Summit (CCECE). She will discuss what other historical software recovery groups can learn from the Medley Interlisp Project.

https://ccece2025.ieee.ca/technical-program

https://ccece2025.ieee.ca

if we don't packet analyze the DG client and build a server emulator first, someone else will.

https://archive.org/details/disneygirlfriends2001

back in the mid-90s just prior to sierra's downfall into fmv and poorly funded titles (their sale to CUC international), the company started looking for low-risk low-profit income avenues.

in the post-doom FPS feeding frenzy, the bloom was off adventure games. they were expensive to produce, and their audience was shrinking fast.

one solution was recycling old software, and honestly, it was great for a 13 year old kid like me, because it meant that i could buy a "sierra game" for $10 instead of the $60-$80 i would normally have to pay for a flagship title

Crazy Nick's Software Picks were collections of mini-games taken from sierra adventures. there were several of them - LSL, King's Quest - I happened to find this Conquest of the Longbow pack at a pharmacy.

the games were *great* - Archery and Nine Men's Morris kept me absolutely occupied for weeks. I had no idea at the time that they were culled from a full sierra adventure, until I discovered it by accident in my twenties.

today i found my copy of the game, buried in another game box. it still has the greasy kid fingerprint from me eating a bag of Old Dutch (regular) chips while i played

today's archival/software preservation work -

i noticed that PCBoard BBS software's wikipedia article mentioned something kinda weird - that just before clark development went bankrupt in 1997, it was building a server called MetaWorlds... an attempt at bridging the ansi-based BBS with the WWW.

sadly, the software never made it out of beta, and was nowhere to be found.. until today it seems! i managed to dig it out of the glorious ibm wgam-wbiz collection, and i've uploaded a copy to IA:

https://archive.org/details/metaworlds_beta

i honestly don't really understand what MetaWorlds does, so i'm hoping a PCBoard wiz manages to get it talking to their pcb instance, and lets us know how it all works.

update: located a newer beta. uploaded here: https://archive.org/details/metaworlds-beta-17

final update: version 1.02 (final) found!
https://archive.org/details/pcb-metaworlds

back in the early and mid-90s, getting on the net meant you were a university student, or had corporate access through a big company. getting online wasn't easy.

worse, even if you had a dialup number and login, there was no such thing as a tcp/ip stack built-in to Windows 3.1.

even if you *did* have a winsock stack, you'd still need a file downloading protocol, gopher client, world wide web client, ftp client, email client. just getting your machine off the ground was nearly impossible unless you could grab these from a local BBS

to make things simpler, universities began offering dial-up internet software packages to their students and staff.

in 1994, my mom was an undergrad student at the University of Alberta. our family had just bought an IBM PS/1 with a 2400 baud modem, and i was abusing the hell out of our single phone line at night visiting local BBSes.

she somehow found out that the university was selling internet dial-up software for $10 to students, and brought home the diskette pack with her. along with a USR Sportster 14.4k modem, she gave me the install diskettes as a valentine's day gift.

it had a slick setup program that enabled SLIP using Trumpet Winsock, and provided a local (free!) dial-up number for access.

after 25 years, i finally tracked down a few versions of those diskettes. i've imaged them and uploaded them all to IA.

the first version of the dial-up package in 1994 was called WinSLIP. it had no PPP support yet, but contained some really cool shareware internet utilities like HGopher and NCSA Mosaic. this would have been the earliest programs offered for Windows 3.1

WinSLIP/MSKermit 1994/95:
https://archive.org/details/ua_winslip

The second version of the software was renamed to NetSurf. It stripped out most of the obscure shareware sadly, and replaced them with Netscape 2 and Eudora Light. The new version of Trumpet Winsock offered PPP which was a huge improvement:

NetSurf 1996/97:
https://archive.org/details/ua_netsurf_96

Now well into the Windows 95 era, the 1997/98 software was shipped on a CD with a hilarious "multimedia" installer/help program designed in Macromedia Director:

NetSurf 1997/98:
https://archive.org/details/netsurf-97-starter-kit

I hope this brings back some memories for fellow U of A alumni :)

it took 20 years of ebay searches but i finally found them: the internet software diskettes i got from the U of A in the mid 90s!

looking forward to imaging these when i get home tonight and uploading them to IA

caligari truespace 4.0 source for win9x

as released by the scene group Revolt in 1998

this is not my release - just my archival work. the source for truespace has been hiding in plain sight for 25+ years. having exhausted all my known avenues for finding an "official" seal of approval from the publisher, community-based preservation is the only possibility now.

the story: apparently someone from Revolt went to caligari's public FTP server in the late 90s, and found that an employee had left the full source for TrueSpace 4 in a /pub folder. it was released on BBSes and on IRC in the late 90s, and disappeared from the internet soon after.

doing some research on TrueSpace - truly the best piece of 3D modelling/rendering software aside from Bryce in the 90s - i stumbled upon a brief mention of the source code in an ancient usenet post. tracking down the release involved searching the *exceptional* scenelist.org NFO database, and trying to figure out the exact filename of the warez release.

SCiZE, the scenelist.org owner, did not have the files on his BBS. fortunately, he knew exactly where to find the release: it was buried in the massive 500GB "ibm-wgam-wbiz-collection" on IA. knowing the exact filename made it so much easier to track down in there!

so, have some fun with it. this doesn't belong on github or any publicly scrapable source site. just download it and let's see who can manage to compile it first :)

see the instructions in revolt.nfo for extra help on compiling

https://archive.org/details/ts4src

urgh. after a week of very interesting research and digging, i've located the source code for a very popular 3d rendering/modelling program from the 90s and 2000s: Caligari trueSpace

does anyone in the digital preservation world know someone at the Microsoft Open Source Programs (OSPO) office?
i'd love for this to be officially sanctioned as an OSS project.

Hello from the Medley Interlisp Project! We revive and modernize the Medley Interlisp extensible graphical operating and programming environment created at Xerox PARC.

https://interlisp.org

We post news & updates, tips, historical info, and more. We look forward to connecting with researchers, software preservation experts, Lisp programmers, retrocomputing enthusiasts, and anyone interested.

friendly request for fellow software preservationists:

i've been looking for a particular Win95-based program that was in use roughly from 1997-2000 called Peck's Power Post. it was a usenet binary posting program that was incredibly popular on binary groups in the late 90s, before it was replaced by Power Post 2000.

I know that the filename was PPP06B.ZIP and/or PPP06BF.ZIP

unfortunately, WBM didn't keep a proper archive of the file. the snapshot of http://www.visi.com/~loganx/PPP06b.zip appears to be corrupted, only downloading a 1MB file.

the file is approximately 4MB total.

discmaster and WBM have been searched exhaustively for this file with no luck. if you happen to know of another source for this very obscure program, i'd be indebted.