A curated list of web sites of the old-school: mostly non-commercial and all hand-made, survivals of the Web As It Once Was. And sites that preserve the spirit of it.
The ten most recent additions are available in a handy RSS format!
12 sites tagged with software. [Show all sites]
Discmaster
It's back! Experimental website to browse and search vintage computer files from archive.org. Thousands of new files are added daily. Added 2022-10-20, removed 2023-06-26, re-added 2024-07-19:
date added: 2024-07-19
tags: search software retro
The NOTIS History Webpage
A site dedicated to the history of the NOTIS Integrated Library System (aka "catalogue", if you're not a librarian). "NOTIS (Northwestern On-line Total Integrated System) was developed at Northwestern University Library beginning in 1967, installed at other sites starting in 1979, spun-off as a separate, for-profit company in 1987, sold to Ameritech in 1991, and last used by any library in 2012." That's a pretty good run ...
date added: 2024-05-11
tags: libraries software history
Simon Tatham's Home Page
Home page of Simon Tatham, a software engineer and free-software author in Cambridge, UK. Best known (to me, anyway) as the author of PuTTY, Simon Tatham has also written numerous other utilities, games, fonts, algorithms and essays, many of which are linked here.
date added: 2022-09-30
tags: unix software homepages programming games
Colossal Cave Adventure Page
All about the OG text adventure game. History, source code, and everything you ever wanted to know about the magic word XYZZY.
date added: 2022-08-23
tags: literature art software games
The Interactive Fiction Archive
"Since 1992, the Archive has collected thousands of text adventures, text adventure development tools, articles, essays, hint files, walkthroughs, jokes, and sly references to Greek politics."
date added: 2022-05-06
tags: writing art literature software games
http://www.devili.iki.fi/
Commodore service manuals, Luxor ABC800 home page, FTP site mirrors. Lots of interesting old software and documentation on a site that's been online since 1997.
date added: 2022-02-20
tags: computers software documentation commodore
WILLOW (Washington Information Looker-upper Layered Over Windows)
A general purpose information retrieval tool, designed to search across multiple bibliographic databases and the University of Washington's library catalogue. Although development ceased in 1999, remarkably it is still hosted in a top-level directory on the University of Washington web site.
date added: 2022-02-13
tags: software
textfiles.com
"What this site offers is a glimpse into the history of writers and artists bound by the 128 characters that the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) allowed them. The focus is on mid-1980's textfiles and the world as it was then, but even these files are sometime retooled 1960s and 1970s works". Brought to you by the indefatiguable Jason Scott.
date added: 2022-02-12
tags: art writing bbs history software
Metropoli BBS files
Old software,demos and drivers hosted on the Metropoli BBS in Helsinki, Finland
date added: 2022-01-11
tags: software bbs
Arachnophilia Home Page
Download Paul Lutus' Arachnophilia HTML editor and read about the 'careware' philosophy. First released in 1996, still being maintained as of 2020.
date added: 2022-01-10
tags: software hypertext
Chebucto Community Net
Download some old software (Apple, Amiga, DOS, OS/2, Windows, etc) from a venerable Community Net in Nova Scotia. Looking for Netscape 1.1N for X11R6? Find it here.
date added: 2022-01-04
tags: software retro
Cool, but obscure X11 tools
A small collection of tools for the X Window System.
date added: 2022-01-02
tags: software unix retro