Discmaster - A Website That Lets You Peek Into the Past

According to sources, tech archivist Jason Scott just announced Discmaster, a brand-new website that lets anybody browse 91.7 million ancient computer files recovered from CD-ROM and floppy disc releases. Additionally, this website is ideal for giving you a blast from the past and reliving your childhood memories if you were born in the 1980s or the 1990s.

If you give the slightest whit of a care about 1980s-2000s computer and software history, your mind is about to be very blown. Some people worked very hard on this, and anonymous credit to them. So, set aside your week, this is going to be change everything for you.

— Jason Scott (@textfiles) October 18, 2022

About the website

Discmaster provides a rare look into a time in cultural history typically obscured by issues with antiquated hardware and incompatible file types. Furthermore, the files on Discmaster come from The Internet Archive, where tens of thousands of users contributed information over the years. The brand-new website puts them all under a search engine that enables users to perform thorough searches by a number of factors, such as file type, size, date, format, and source. Moreover, unidentified history-loving programmers created Discmaster and then begged Scott to host it on their behalf. Scott claims that Discmaster is "99.999 percent" the work of the anonymous group, right down to the retro grey theme that is compatible with older devices' web browsers. Additionally, Scott assured sources that Discmaster is "100 unaffiliated" with the Internet Archive, despite the fact that he works there. Also, Read- This Website Tells How Long It Take To Finish a Video Game On another note, one advantage of Discmaster is that a significant portion of the file format conversion has already been finished on the back end, making it simpler to access older files. For instance, you don't need any additional software to search for and listen to ancient music files in your browser.

More details

According to the Discmaster's Twitter announcement thread, people are already using the service to locate software they misplaced in the 1990s, including rare BBS files, bitmap typefaces, ZZT worlds, and ancient music software. In a statement, Scott remarked, "It is probably, to me, one of the most important computer history research project opportunities that we've had in 10 years. It's not done. They've analyzed 7,000 and some-odd CD-ROMs. And they're about to do another 8,000." On the other hand, legal considerations prevent the integration of all Archive.org data into Discmaster. In addition, the website focuses on shareware and archival media, but some files may be missing or inaccessible. However, by clicking the link with its (.txt) suffix, people can still view unintelligible text files. In other news, Scott is famous for his avant-garde approaches to digital archiving. According to sources, he collaborated to support GeoCities, converted Flash files, made a tonne of MS-DOS games playable through a web browser, and more. On his personal website Textfiles.com, he has been hosting BBS files and CD-ROM archives for around 20 years. However, until today, Discmaster was unable to use those resources to do the kind of exact searches that are now possible.