Post by @projectgus@aus.social

Australian retrocomputing(ish) nerds, I've been helping my dad clean out some stuff and have stumbled into a trove of 90s and 2000s PC software...

I don't know all of what is here, but we have some boxed software including Windows 98 & ME, and a stack of PC magazine cover CDs from the 90s and early 2000s. Also about a billion versions of AutoCAD (my dad is a retired architect.)

Does anyone collect or archive any of this stuff? Will send to good homes within Australia for cost of postage.

4 media files

Australian Personal Computer Magazine CDs from 2001

An Australian National Phone Directory on CD from 1996

Windows 98 install guide and boot floppy

6 Replies

2 Boosts

Gus

@projectgus@aus.social 1 hr. ago

AutoCAD release 13 (1994), the first version to include a solid modeller.

This was the optional "documentation pack", a quite fancy boxed set of the manuals. Imagine it cost quite a bit!

Despite the quite fetching box design, the software manuals are still plain old manuals!

4 media files

Pulling the manuals out of the documentation pack

The back of the documentation pack is a fancy city scene

Gus

@projectgus@aus.social 1 hr. ago

That linked review is fantastic:

"Much of this is probably due to the sheer size of everything – large chunks of 32-bit data being pushed around by over 5Mb of executable program will stress even the highest-spec PC."

... An entire multi-modal 2D/3D graphical CAD program in a 5MB executable with a minimum 8MB RAM requirement (32 recommended), and the reviewer criticises it for being big!

decryption

@decryption@aus.social 1 hr. ago

@projectgus you could run this on an ESP32, lol

blaue_flecken

@blaue_flecken@blumenwie.se 1 hr. ago

@decryption Is that supposed to be a challenge? /me checks calendar for the weekend @projectgus

1+ more replies

Gus

@projectgus@aus.social 2 hr. ago

This feels @decryption adjacent, although maybe because you've also been trying to get rid of a bunch of it...

decryption

@decryption@aus.social 2 hr. ago

@projectgus I know @voltagex is keen for old CD-ROMs!