Treasure trove of floppies

[TweedyF]

A fellow on my local Craigslist sold me what must be at least 200 floppies full of Mac software from the late 80's/early 90's for $5 this week. Most of them are 800k disks. There's even a (sadly overwritten and written on) official LisaDraw floppy! Nuts!

I'm going to slowly image and stuff what's on all of these and find out where best to archive them online. Will store and share as I can – and if there are any real gems along the way, I'll post about them here specially!

 

[erichelgeson]

Wow! Hope there's one or two versions of things not uploaded to the garden yet. I recently went through about 70 800k disks and 25% of them were unreadable - be interested in your % bad after you've gone threw them.

 

[cheesestraws]

Can't wait to see what you have here!

 

[joethezombie]

Awesome! And subscribed!

 

[Mu0n]

Would love it if you found Studio Session song files (or from other similar composition software like concertware), or VideoWorks animations, hypercard stacks. Anything that's personal creativity is always fun to discover.

 

[danda]

Would love it if you found ... hypercard stacks

I am the maintainer of the HyperCard Online project, and over the past three years have got over 3,500 stacks running online in the browser (thanks to hosting and help from the Internet Archive).

I've built an online uploader for anyone to add their own stacks to the collection - if you find any stacks, I'd love it if you uploaded them so I could add them to the collection.

 

[Scott Baret]

Do any of these disks contain a program called Dinosaur Days? I've been looking for that one for 25 years!!

 

[indianboi3]

That's a damn great find. Congrats man.

 

[TweedyF]

I've built an online uploader for anyone to add their own stacks to the collection - if you find any stacks, I'd love it if you uploaded them so I could add them to the collection.

That’s amazing! Definitely will do. 
 

@Scott Baret I’ll keep an eye out for Dinosaur Days. 
 

So far nothing much out of the ordinary. It seems like these came from someone who did engineering or software work at GCC back in the day, so there are a lot of utilities and that kind of thing. 
 

On the plus side, I’d say better than nine in ten have no bad segments. 
 

Anyway I’ll keep plugging through them!

 

[cheesestraws]

Keep an eye out for rare dev tools as well, then!  Some of those have apparently been lost to time...

 

[TweedyF]

Quick question - I'm imaging these using DiskDup+ then stuffing using Stuffit 5.5. Should I be using a different version of Stuffit?

Would love if anyone knows offhand what the ideal version to use would be. As it is, I'm not familiar enough with all the compatibility issues to know, and since Stuffit is a pain as it is, I've just been using the version installed on the Mac with the floppy drive that I'm using to image the disks.

 

[TweedyF]

Also @Dog Cow I found a copy of TOPS -- let me know if you want to try it out!

 

[cheesestraws]

 I found a copy of TOPS -- let me know if you want to try it out! 

Ooh, what version of TOPS?

 

[NJRoadfan]

If there is a "LaserWriter Installation Disk" dated 1985, that would be something to archive (driver would be earlier then 3.0). The original release of the LaserWriter driver seems "lost" for the moment.

 

[Crutch]

It looks like you MAY have Lightspeed C 2.0 or earlier there.  To my knowledge that doesn’t exist on any archive and would be a Nice Find.

(I see what look like two sets of original Lightspeed C disks:  the ones with the red label are version 3, which is on the Garden.  The set with the white label isn’t familiar to me and is, I’m hoping, an earlier version.  If so, please upload it to an archive   I don’t see disk 1 of that version however in the picture ...) 

 

[LaPorta]

I believe I have TOPS...I have no idea what the heck it is, but I know I archived it from a floppy somewhere.

 

[Byrd]

I believe I have TOPS...I have no idea what the heck it is, but I know I archived it from a floppy somewhere.

I think .. it was some sort of early networking protocol software, between Macs and PCs?

 

[LaPorta]

Personally, for disks this old, I’d say StuffIt 1.5 max should be your goal. 

 

[Juror22]

Keep an eye out for rare dev tools as well, then!  Some of those have apparently been lost to time...

Interested in ClearLake Research libraries and such.

That's a terrific find - I've gotten a few similar caches, but mine have always turned out to be PC-based.