back in the early and mid-90s, getting on the net meant you were a university student, or had corporate access through a big company. getting online wasn't easy.

worse, even if you had a dialup number and login, there was no such thing as a tcp/ip stack built-in to Windows 3.1.

even if you *did* have a winsock stack, you'd still need a file downloading protocol, gopher client, world wide web client, ftp client, email client. just getting your machine off the ground was nearly impossible unless you could grab these from a local BBS

to make things simpler, universities began offering dial-up internet software packages to their students and staff.

in 1994, my mom was an undergrad student at the University of Alberta. our family had just bought an IBM PS/1 with a 2400 baud modem, and i was abusing the hell out of our single phone line at night visiting local BBSes.

she somehow found out that the university was selling internet dial-up software for $10 to students, and brought home the diskette pack with her. along with a USR Sportster 14.4k modem, she gave me the install diskettes as a valentine's day gift.

it had a slick setup program that enabled SLIP using Trumpet Winsock, and provided a local (free!) dial-up number for access.

after 25 years, i finally tracked down a few versions of those diskettes. i've imaged them and uploaded them all to IA.

the first version of the dial-up package in 1994 was called WinSLIP. it had no PPP support yet, but contained some really cool shareware internet utilities like HGopher and NCSA Mosaic. this would have been the earliest programs offered for Windows 3.1

WinSLIP/MSKermit 1994/95:
https://archive.org/details/ua_winslip

The second version of the software was renamed to NetSurf. It stripped out most of the obscure shareware sadly, and replaced them with Netscape 2 and Eudora Light. The new version of Trumpet Winsock offered PPP which was a huge improvement:

NetSurf 1996/97:
https://archive.org/details/ua_netsurf_96

Now well into the Windows 95 era, the 1997/98 software was shipped on a CD with a hilarious "multimedia" installer/help program designed in Macromedia Director:

NetSurf 1997/98:
https://archive.org/details/netsurf-97-starter-kit

I hope this brings back some memories for fellow U of A alumni :)

it took 20 years of ebay searches but i finally found them: the internet software diskettes i got from the U of A in the mid 90s!

looking forward to imaging these when i get home tonight and uploading them to IA

caligari truespace 4.0 source for win9x

as released by the scene group Revolt in 1998

this is not my release - just my archival work. the source for truespace has been hiding in plain sight for 25+ years. having exhausted all my known avenues for finding an "official" seal of approval from the publisher, community-based preservation is the only possibility now.

the story: apparently someone from Revolt went to caligari's public FTP server in the late 90s, and found that an employee had left the full source for TrueSpace 4 in a /pub folder. it was released on BBSes and on IRC in the late 90s, and disappeared from the internet soon after.

doing some research on TrueSpace - truly the best piece of 3D modelling/rendering software aside from Bryce in the 90s - i stumbled upon a brief mention of the source code in an ancient usenet post. tracking down the release involved searching the *exceptional* scenelist.org NFO database, and trying to figure out the exact filename of the warez release.

SCiZE, the scenelist.org owner, did not have the files on his BBS. fortunately, he knew exactly where to find the release: it was buried in the massive 500GB "ibm-wgam-wbiz-collection" on IA. knowing the exact filename made it so much easier to track down in there!

so, have some fun with it. this doesn't belong on github or any publicly scrapable source site. just download it and let's see who can manage to compile it first :)

see the instructions in revolt.nfo for extra help on compiling

https://archive.org/details/ts4src

Eelco Vriezekol, the admin of the marvelous #Signetics2650 page, added the audio from the #Instructor50 #cassette I recently digitized. He also did a transcription of the spoken parts!

https://ztpe.nl/2650/hardware/signetics-instructor-50/

Here's my fork of #httpget 0.2 and 1.3 (that later would become #curl) minimally fixed to build and run on modern Linux. Please note that these fixes are exactly that: They just make the commands actually build, run, and perform the basic task. Other than that, I attempted to preserve as much of the original buggy behaviour as possible. There are known security issues with these commands, and these #vulnerabilities remain. I repeat, do *NOT* use these commands for anything but research and toying around. You have been warned.

https://github.com/piru/httpget/tree/minimal-fixes

The Story of X-Copy: Amiga’s Most Famous Copy Tool & Rare Cyclone Hardware
#Amiga #RetroComputing #XCopy #KryoFlux #SoftwarePreservation #RobSmithDev #VintageGaming #Cyclone
https://theoasisbbs.com/the-story-of-x-copy-amigas-most-famous-copy-tool-rare-cyclone-hardware/?feed_id=1727&_unique_id=67b5e42fb1854

urgh. after a week of very interesting research and digging, i've located the source code for a very popular 3d rendering/modelling program from the 90s and 2000s: Caligari trueSpace

does anyone in the digital preservation world know someone at the Microsoft Open Source Programs (OSPO) office?
i'd love for this to be officially sanctioned as an OSS project.

Hello from the Medley Interlisp Project! We revive and modernize the Medley Interlisp extensible graphical operating and programming environment created at Xerox PARC.

https://interlisp.org

We post news & updates, tips, historical info, and more. We look forward to connecting with researchers, software preservation experts, Lisp programmers, retrocomputing enthusiasts, and anyone interested.

SOLVED!

Thanks to @accela I now know that Atari/Bioware Linux installer for the original version of Neverwinter Nights (not the recent Enhanced Edition) can be downloaded from https://neverwintervault.org/platform/linux

I'm contemplating a 2003 era retro Linux PC build.