This website is intended to serve as the central focus of my growing archival efforts, allowing me to easily formalise my thinking and share my philosophy and methodology.
My hope is that, over time, this website will become a resource and inspiration for others and encourage more people to make the effort to archive everything.
A beginning – vintage Apple Mac software
It all started in the early 2010s, when I really got into retro-computing (primarily Apple Macintosh, but I was also deeply keen on Commodore Amiga and vintage games console systems). I sourced a lot of vintage computer software online, but also started collecting – floppies and CDs by the bucketload from eBay!
One day, I realised that I had a huge collection of Macintosh magazine cover CDs from the 1990s through early-2000s – 600 or so CDs total – and that each of these was stuffed full of Macintosh shareware software.
Shovelware – derided at the time but hugely valuable today for software archivists
This was a common practice in the early CD-ROM era and became pejoratively referred to as “shovelware”, as in “shovel it in with little care or thought, just to be able to boast the hundreds of MB of software on the CD“…
Well, one man’s garbage is another man’s treasure, and as it turns out these stuffed-to-the-gills CDs are now, decades later, valuable repositories of rare (or, often, totally lost) software.
I started to pull this Macintosh shareware off of the CDs and onto one of my vintage Macs and eventually ended up with 20GB or so of files!
After a little organising and then carefully packaging in safe Macintosh compression archives, I looked to get these online, and lo! – the Vintage Apple Macintosh Shareware Games collection came into existence at the Internet Archive in April 2017.
That whetted my appetite and I started to archive more – Macintosh stuff mostly (including emulated-in-browser software items), but then material relating to the Medway Music Scene, the rock band Radiohead, and most recently the Glastonbury Festival, along with lots of other random bits and bobs.
So, that’s my story, and I look forward to sharing my ongoing amateur archival efforts, and hopefully inspiring others to start to do likewise!