"Lost" PD libraries

[Matt_H]

In browsing through a small collection of disks that I acquired from a former Amigan, I noticed a handful of disks from a collection called "PD Software Digest." It's old 1.x-era stuff - the disks range from 1987 to 1989 - and at a quick glance none of the programs are on Aminet. The only other references I can find to this library are someone selling a few disks a couple of years ago, and some OCR'd text from an advertisement in Amiga World magazine (I guess this technically makes it a diskmag rather than a PD library, but that's beside the point).

It got me thinking about other old PD libraries that are not generally known to the internet. Apart from the Fish collection, most (all?) of the currently archived libraries originate from Europe. There's a big missing gap in terms of what American non-commercial developers were producing in the early years. In addition to the Fish disks, I remember disks from a few other PD libraries kicking around when I was growing up.

While there's little practical value to the software (unless someone is running a 1.3 productivity system for giggles), it would be good to get more of this archived and preserved. It's an important part of Amiga history. I've made ADFs of the Software Digest in the meantime. Will see about getting them up on Aminet.

[Matt_H]

I think it is a shame that so much software has been lost from the 80's (and late 70's ). There was a great article I read a few years ago about the loss of history from this era. Most programmers didn't save their work or if they did they could not access it anymore because the media has changed so much. Of course, many of the programmers are no longer with us.  Such a great loss...



Update:

Here is a link to an OSNews article on Atari ST users who paid to have an old HD recovered so they could get the last build of Geneva/NeoDesk. One ST user paid for the recovery and others pitched in after the fact.  Pretty neat story. I'm glad they were able to rescue this before it it was gone forever.

http://www.osnews.com/story/29903/Atari_ST_multitasking_OS_Geneva_NeoDesk_to_be_open_sourced

Universities are (generally speaking) just starting to get into digital archiving, and by the time their operations are sophisticated enough to get to the early years, it will probably be too late. Good thing devices like the Kyroflux are readily available now, meaning that more people can work to recover obscure disks.

The Geneva/NeoDesk story reminds me of HTMLview from our own community. Original author Allan Odgaard's hard drive with the source code had a defective interface board. The community was able to find a replacement board, repair the hard drive, and recover the code. A lot more ingenuity like that is going to be required in the near future.



I suspect it's unlikely that we'll find any 100% intact PD libraries at this point, but we should try to make an effort to image those disks when possible. I'd completely ignored the ones mentioned in my first post when I first picked them up, but was doing another pass through the collection to see if I'd missed anything and I'm glad I checked.

[Matt_H]

Whew! Remembering this old thread, myself. Any preservation is good. I'm not familiar with the KT library or whether it's already been archived, but it would be great if you could still find it.

Some of the American libraries I had in mind are Amicus, AMUSE, DevWare, Software of the Month Club... I keep coming across scattered disks of these and others here and there. I know there's lots of American BBS stuff that is currently lost but that might have made it into one of these libraries...