pendell

Current Hyperfixation: Wizard of Oz

  • He/Him

I use outdated technology just for fun, listen to crappy music, and watch a lot of horror movies. Expect posts about These Things. I talk a lot.

Check tags like Star Trek Archive and Media Piracy to find things I share for others.



Thinkin' about how depressing software archival is when you start getting into the 2000s and beyond. So much software that you basically Can't archive - not only due to legal shit, but because of online DRM that's been down for years, or digital-only distribution which means it's nigh-impossible to actually find copies to archive.

You'd think the solution would be "oh! Look to the pirates! They'll have torrents sitting around of fully cracked versions you can install offline!" But that's just the thing. All that stuff was distributed via torrents. The one major flaw of torrents is that if the file you're sharing isn't popular enough, the torrent stops existing.

You can find plenty of .torrent files for cracked versions of years-old versions of software. All of them are dead. The best you can do is add them to a 24/7 seedbox and pray to some deity that a seeder will one day come back from the dead - an unlikely event.

... So yeah, this entire post was predicated on me failing to find any software I can put on an old 32-bit Intel MacBook I have lying around. You can find older versions for PowerPC Macs because software was still distributed on discs back then. You can find software for current generation Intel and ARM Macs because they're current and used by lots of people. Got a 32-bit Mac? It's a wasteland. You know there was software for it, but you're not gonna find any of it.


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in reply to @pendell's post:

Are you looking for anything in particular? 32-bit Intel Macs (honestly, even the first several years of 64-bit Intel Macs) are still characterized by most commercial software releases being on physical discs or if they were online, you got a DMG (on Mac) of the software..

It was a little further on, really post 2011-2012 or so that we're starting to see things move to online distribution exclusively, and not only "online distribution" but like... no-versions or continuous versions, there not really being a monolithic offline installer pegged to a specific moment, etc etc, so you can pretty easily still find stuff for macos 10.4/5/6 for PPC and Intel -- in five more years it's gonna be basically impossible to install software on a macos 10.10 machine, save for whatever from the 10.6 era still runs on 10.10.

part of the trouble is, it feels like perhaps The Plateau has people worried about longer and longer timelines on previous software, e.g. people are worried today about Adobe CS6 from 2010 in a way that in 2002 people wouldn't have been all that worried about distributing commercial software from 1990. Perhaps the gleaming shimmer of hope on the Mac side of things is that you can't credibly claim that, say, Adobe CS4/5/6 are reasonable for modern Macs in a way that, say, CS1 from like 2004 still installs (more or less) fine on Windows 11.

(That's actually kind of interesting because like, I haven't heard anything about, say, winworld moving forward with, say, Windows XP, which is itself now software that's over 20 years old, or, say, 15-year old software like Office 2007.)

... Anyway.

(disclaimer: I'm helped by having had a lot of this when it's new so a nonzero amount of what I have is literally discs of software I bought for myself in 2007.)

Tangentially, one thing I was working on for myself was a SuperDuperable disk image template for 10.4/ppc and 10.6/intel, mainly because at some point Apple's likely to pull the plug on OS updates for those releases, dunno if that'll e something I, like, "release" per se but, it's something I'm reminded I should probably put a little more time into at some point

Mainly Apple's own software suites, but also other apps I consider basic utilities, like later versions of Toast. I was wanting to try out old versions of Final Cut for Intel Macs but that's just impossible to find active downloads for.

sorry for the delay: I have most of that, but not handy enough to just send you a onedrive link. Final Cut Studio 2 (FCP6 & friends) I have as a box, 10.6/iwork09/ilife09/ilife11 and aperture 3 i have as DMGs I think - I can image FCS2 at some point. It's, uh... like forty gigs of dual-layer DVDs.

some of the third party stuff I'm sketchier on, I pirated some version of toast back in the day but I didn't really retain it but I think newer toast may be on macgarden.