The Retrocomputing Archive | Hacker News Reader

The Retrocomputing Archive

retroarchive.org

128 pointselvis7022 comments

I'm curious if there's a site tracking new software for vintage platforms such as ssheven which is a modern SSH client for Mac OS 7/8/9. For the occasional retrocomputing enthusiast, it'd be great to have a dedicated resource tracking all the great new work the community is producing. (And a way to also collaborate/give back via open source.)

That's a great idea! And thanks for the tip on ssheven, I have an OS 9 machine I've gotten networked but having a devil of a time getting any network client software onto it without a lot of floppy hoop-jumping, and scp would be real handy.

I have a Pi running FTP on the same network for file transfers, works good so far

Nice to see these kind of collections, I've been spending a lot of time recently running old CP/M software and there is a wealth of the stuff available.

Fun to go through text-based games written 20+ years ago, and even if I completed one a day I suspect I'd be dead before I'd played them all.

Archive and/or reshare if you can. The thread might be thinner than you think.

Use 50/100 GB (m-disc) BD-Rs if in doubt.

I wonder if archive.org would take them.

Archive.org will probably take a lot of stuff but they have to be very conservative about what they make available, due to their high profile. OP mentions the UTZOO usenet archives which apparently are no longer available there, likely because someone asserted a copyright claim.

I'll have to dig up some obscure old software, and see whether this site has a place for any of it. Just curiosities and personal nostalgia at this point.

I released a bunch of MS-DOS shareware as a kid, but only to local free BBSes (no money for paid online services nor long-distance phone calls). I also made a couple shrinkwrap software packages that I started to sell in computer stores around age 15-16, before I got a real software engineering job (and sold my PC, bought a used Sun workstation, and switched to open source).

One day, I was talking with someone from Finland, and he thought he remembered seeing a D&D character generator of mine there. But otherwise, I've never seen or heard of it.

The Vintage Computer Federation West 2021 is this Saturday, Aug. 7, at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA. I don't actually know if CP/M will be featured anywhere, but I wouldn't be surprised.

Full disclosure: I'm speaking about my new book on the Xerox Star, "Inventing the Future." The cover is a stylization of someone [1] "playing" MazeWar on a real, restored Xerox Alto. There's a guy in Bothell, WA with a basement full of old computers, including two Altos and many VAXen, where we shot the photo.

[1] The someone is Jeffrey Smith, the son of Dave Smith, the inventor of icons.

Saw BBS toolkit near the top and had to wonder if Maximus BBS was on the list and It was! So many memories setting that up back in the day and using other local BBS based on Maximus.

I’ve done some more recent setup of major BBS to replay some muds and this sure brings back some pleasant memories.

Thanks for the post down nostalgia lane!

I'd love if it this site had full-text search _within_ the archives (ie: text files and strings on executables). I've occasionally stumbled across my old works, but I'd love to search all the ZIP files for stuff I've forgotten that I wrote!

I love retrocomputing, but for whatever reason that font and color combo on my display is fuzzy and strains my eyes. I get the design aesthetic, but maybe a little modernization or deviation for readability might be in order.

The color palette was probably chosen to optimize power use and minimize burn-in on OLED displays. I found it quite readable, and quite considerate of the user as well.

You’re young aren’t you.

The color palette is to evoke the old amber monochrome crt displays.

Great to see people sharing stuff that we all might never see again otherwise... the digital black hole is real and individuals are those doing the archiving! Respect :)

What is a good CP/M emulator?

I use CP/M For OSX by Thomas Harte. It's smooth and simple and a good place to get your feet wet. Good for those quick games of ADVENT or HUNT or whathaveyou.

I use this one:

https://github.com/jhallen/cpm

This is a wonderful resource, looking forward to exploring.

This is somewhat tangential but I was hoping the hive mind here might have some good ideas.

Does anyone know of a modern equivalent -- of course, as equivalent as it can be in a world where shareware isn't quite what it was -- to these infamous shareware CD-ROMs (e.g. http://annex.retroarchive.org/cdrom/640_studio_v/index.html )? Or, to make it somewhat easier for younger (!?) audiences, of a modern-ish equivalent to Freshmeat.net?

By this, I mean something that would include:

a) New software (either newly-written programs or new versions of programs), or at least news about new software

b) In a somewhat organised fashion?

A humongous part of what I know today originated in tinkering with programs like these, from various fields, or from digging around things like the NightOwl archive ( http://annex.retroarchive.org/cdrom/nightowl-007/index.html ), reading source code, wondering how various demos are made and so on. And, of course, later, from browsing Freshmeat.

The best I can do right now is bookmark a bunch of search pages on Github and Gitlab, visit a bunch of subreddits like /r/linux which will probably give me eye cancer sooner or later, and -- as much as I hate it -- subscribing to the AppKed RSS feed, not because I want to touch any of their downloads but because it's pretty much the only way I get to learn about new programs for macOS.

This is sub-optimal to say the least. Except for AppKed, these meet neither a) nor b), and I really don't want to rely on something like fsckin AppKed for something that I suspect can be done from legitimate sources.

I know about app stores and the like but they're not exactly useful for discovering new software even on mobile, where they're actually a thing.

tl;dr does anyone know of a modern equivalent to either Freshmeat or 640 MB of Shareware?

GitHub's Explore page occasionally unearths neat utilities I didn't know of, although it is based on the user's past activity (when logged in) and tends to show projects of similar nature that one's been looking at or working on: https://github.com/explore

Hey, thanks! I think I tried to poke around Github Explore a couple of times. It's still a disorganised pile of stuff but I guess at least it's a new disorganised pile of stuff, I'll check it out some more :-).

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