Whether you need an old driver or the original manual for a vintage program, your first stop should be the Internet Archive. There you can explore millions of files, forgotten documents, and lost websites. Now, a new resource called DiscMaster joins the effort. This project by archivist Jason Scott works as a partial mirror of Archive.org, but offers a much more advanced interface with a wide range of filters and specific details to optimize our searches.
The internet is constantly changing, but the dark side of that change is the disappearance of a huge amount of material. Both the Internet Archive and other digital preservation projects have a titanic task ahead, and we can only appreciate their efforts.
Now a new initiative joins: DiscMaster, created by the archivist and Internet Archive employee Jason Scott. Although there is no formal link between the two organizations, DiscMaster works as a parallel mirror, indexing more than 115 million files, totalling about 11.6 terabytes of data at the time of writing.
Searching files from the last four decades in DiscMaster
The DiscMaster interface reminds us of the early days of the Web (with "New" images and a visit counter included), but beyond the nostalgic factor, that detail ensures extremely fast loading. A click on the "Click Here to Search" link takes us directly to the search box... and the rest is up to us. Need an image? Audio? Music? Fonts? DiscMaster has almost six million items just under the "Executables" category, so there's plenty to explore here.
Results can be filtered by family, format, genre, special tags, size or duration (useful for audio), dimensions (ideal for images), and date.
At the same time, DiscMaster includes filters for NSFW content: The Internet Archive holds a good amount of images and videos of that kind, and to avoid issues (wink, wink), we can activate an equivalent to Safe Search.
There are still many files to be catalogued (this is evident if we consider the 9 million "unknowns"), but DiscMaster's manager warns that he does not plan to be a 1:1 mirror of the Internet Archive. The priority is vintage multimedia content, while some files will simply not be available for legal reasons. In any case, DiscMaster deserves our attention, and we are glad to see it working.
Finally, I also want to mention CD.textfiles, another shovelware paradise on the Web. Searching for old files and programs has never been easier.
Official site: Click here
