Tech archivist Jason Scott has announced a new website called Discmaster that lets anyone search through 91.7 million vintage computer files pulled from CD-ROM releases and floppy disks. The files include images, text documents, music, games, shareware, videos, and much more.
Discmaster opens a window into digital media culture around the turn of the millennium, turning anyone into a would-be digital archeologist. It’s a rare look into a slice of cultural history that is often obscured by the challenges of obsolete media and file format incompatibilities.
The files on Discmaster come from the Internet Archive, uploaded by thousands of people over the years. The new site pulls them together behind a search engine with the ability to perform detailed searches by file type, format, source, file size, file date, and many other options.
“The value proposition is the value proposition of any freely accessible research database,” according to Scott. “People are enabled to do deep dives into more history, reference their findings, and encourage others to look in the same place.”
Discmaster is available at: http://discmaster.textfiles.com/
My thanks to newsletter reader D B Carre for telling me about this new resource.