Oldversion.com – old versions of various programs

A bit unrelated, but a few days ago I remember how much I enjoyed MSN Messenger when I was a teenager, and doing a bit of Googling I found this with my girlfriend: https://escargot.log1p.xyz/

They just recreated the Messenger webserver adn patched the software to connect to it instead of the official (and deprecated one). I downloaded it, used it a few days and it was very enjoyable experience.

Of course, since we don't know how these recreted servers work, I'd suggest to not talk anything important and of course, not use real email addresses or passwords. And also, check if the software has malware (in my attempts to check that, everything was negative).

Anyway I wanted to share it.

Maybe my expectations were wrong but I did not find https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotline_Communications in there, it was the first thing I thought after reading "old versions of various programs" :-)

Hotline to me was something like "the internet behind the curtains" when I was a teenager with its peer-to-peer file sharing and comm to find a whole world besides the pre-Y2K HTML pages, before mainstream stuff like Napster and Kazaa existed and even before I discovered IRC.

This kind of archive or museum places for software are really cool and important!

EDIT: I am trying to upload old Hotline versions to the site but so far I could not even sign up yet, will keep trying though

Twice recently I had to go on treasure hunts to find old, obscure software that is no longer distributed. The first was for my wife's embroidery machine; I was lucky enough to find a copy of the installer in her old NT machine's temporary internet files. The second was a Motorola radio programmer from the late 90s; I snagged a copy from a shady Russian filehost.

It's nice to see projects like this keeping old software available, you never know what will be useful to someone even decades after it stopped being popular.

I miss the days when Real Player was the scurge of humanity. But you needed it to view stuff over the phone line.