Jump to content
IGNORED

Atari specialized software ftp sites going dark need to save them!


_The Doctor__

Recommended Posts

http://wvaughan.org/ras/RAS/ftpsites.html

 

in here you find sites that I used to visit in the 80's and they had software utilities and tools for the 8-bit and Atari St's sadly I find some of the paths dead..... it seems even ftp sites are removing Atari stuff you never might have thought existed due to lack of use...

 

Here is the challenge!!!

:thumbsup: :thumbsup: :thumbsup: :thumbsup: :thumbsup: :thumbsup: :thumbsup: :thumbsup:

Find every Atari ftp sight post it here and have everyone visit them... if it is a closed/moved/deleted path... contact the archivist and see if them can put it back or make it available again..... we need to preserve the materials... serious mathmatical and practical applications are being lost over the last 10 years....

 

some still exist others may be archived or sitting in a dark corner somewhere....

 

http://ftp.funet.fi/pub/atari

http://www.umich.edu/~archive/atari/

ftp://grandis.nu/Atari/

ftp://atari.fornax.sk/pub/atari/

 

CONTENT is dissappearing and the nuclear, astronomy, astrophysics, and other very nice calculatory applications are in danger. Please help find/restore/recover these treasure... yes they are not games. but the calculation in them very well could be..

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Just to make it fun.. if it's Atari of any kind and it's ftp... post it

 

http://www.atari-shrine.co.uk/ftp.shtml

 

where the heck has all the GOPHER server sites gone? they were a gold mine as well....you might find some treasure in the gopher sites of the gaming kind

but usenet seems covered with a sea of garbage...

 

The Atari 8bit and 16bit were used for serious applications and just to see them in action changes the perspective of a person. Let's find em!

Edited by _The Doctor__
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Everyone needs to download and save what they can, while they can. Some time in the future, it can all be reassembled - whether at a more modern site like Atarimania, or whatever. There's a lot of duplication of the stuff over the various sites (some are mirrors of others, even), but specialty science software (which wasn't a really big Atari8 stronghold) may be significantly-more obscure.

 

It's a good idea to try to rescue some of this stuff from oblivion. Back when it was floppy disks going to hell, it seemed "rescued" by placing it on these FTP sites. But the true oblivion will be when they go down, and there's no longer a backup. As most people like A8 games, some of this more obscure stuff really may disappear, much as the floppy disks from whence the stuff came from have largely disappeared. Now that multi-terabyte hard drives can be thrown into a Walmart shopping cart along with bacon and orange juice, I sure hope this stuff doesn't disappear.

 

I was pleased to note that the first Atari repository I became familiar with (in the early 90s when we still used text-based internet)....

 

http://www.umich.edu/~archive/atari/

 

....is still up. There must be some good folks there. I've never attempted to host a website, but perhaps some enterprising fella can archive this stuff on GoDaddy for $5/month and take donations, if it gets that bad??

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

If I'm remembering correctly, Bill Kendrick used to have an ftp search engine of some of those sites, which if you searched for a particular file, you would get all of the duplicate hits and could weed out which were still functioning. Not sure if he maintains it anymore. (A lot of effort.)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Honestly its the stuff on my floppies and cassettes I'm not worried about losing.

 

My floppies have seen bazillions of ftp and websites and hard drives come and go.

 

I dont eqaute posting stuff online with 'rescuing' it, as you know there is no gurantee you will always have access to someones archive.. I just call it sharing..

 

Many sites these days activley try to prevent you archiving their archive with automation.

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/infocom/interpreters/zip/atarizip.zoo

 

is gone.... it contained z file compilers and interpreters for the atari and an improved 512 size engine for infocom text adventures etc.

Not gone.... Just moved.

 

http://ifmirror.russotto.net/indexes/if-archiveXinfocomXinterpretersXzip.html

 

Actually, in a couple places.....

 

http://ifarchive.jmac.org/if-archive/infocom/interpreters/zip/

Edited by Tillek
  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

We need someone to make a decentralized distributed data store Darknet style program something simple... connects to other peers on the darknet, you tell it how much HDD you want to allocate/donate and then everyone start uploading what they have, remove duplicates and there we go.

 

GNUnet http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNUnet and Freenet http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freenet would be exsamples

Edited by ryanmercer
  • Like 2
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Just to make it fun.. if it's Atari of any kind and it's ftp... post it

 

http://www.atari-shrine.co.uk/ftp.shtml

 

where the heck has all the GOPHER server sites gone? they were a gold mine as well....you might find some treasure in the gopher sites of the gaming kind

but usenet seems covered with a sea of garbage...

 

The Atari 8bit and 16bit were used for serious applications and just to see them in action changes the perspective of a person. Let's find em!

 

ftp://ftp.pigwa.net/stuff/collections/

 

ftp.pigwa.net

 

has the CTH (Closer to Home) and Holmes archives.

 

http://a8.fandal.cz/

Edited by russg
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Darn.. Yet another reason to get my BBS back up.

 

Ok. I'll get it compiling and tossed on the air. Dialup will not be available, but SSH and Telnet should be. I've been waiting for FreeBSD 10.1 to get released, but I might not be able to wait that long.

 

Also, how much disk space would be required? I have 1.5TB available (4x500GB R5) in the server.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Does anyone have a good offline backup of any of the FTP's? Pigwa has mirrors for a lot of the others... so far I only have 1 folder in the Atari folder queued and it's 30 something GB (and that's not even everything within the one folder, as it boots me when I'm going through every single sub-folder queuing everything in it up). So 3 days of trying just to get maybe 80% of the first folder (I skipped the audio folder, don't care about it and a lot of it size-wise is just podcasts)...

 

I'm just guessing here, that Pigwa probably has several hundred gigabytes... I'd love to download it all (so it can start uploading to my offsite cloud backup) but it's starting to seem like I'm better off just sending someone a TB usb drive and then having them mail it back, if anyone has a worthwhile amount already archived and organized offline.

 

I still think something like Freenet to help replace the FTP's would be nice... instead of one person or group hosting it all... you get everyone sharing however much HDD space they specify on their machine, and it's all cloud distributed so if one machine goes offline you still have the data out there in the collective cloud. Or something like http://code.google.com/p/mogilefs/ or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GlusterFS or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retroshare .

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I still think something like Freenet to help replace the FTP's would be nice...

 

Ha... "Freenet"... that reminds me of the Free-Nets, which played heavily in my early online computer education/experience. Seems like a small wiki article, but then the whole thing probably seemed bigger to me because of what it encompassed and the fact that I live/lived near Cleveland where it all got started. Ah, the good old days of free text-based networking...

Edited by MrFish
  • Like 3
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Yeah I think we can squeeze every 8 bit file ever written into 1.5TB about 400 times over.

 

I am currently downloading the Umich.edu site if it breaks 20mb I'd be shocked

 

 

 

Darn.. Yet another reason to get my BBS back up.

 

Ok. I'll get it compiling and tossed on the air. Dialup will not be available, but SSH and Telnet should be. I've been waiting for FreeBSD 10.1 to get released, but I might not be able to wait that long.

 

Also, how much disk space would be required? I have 1.5TB available (4x500GB R5) in the server.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Honestly its the stuff on my floppies and cassettes I'm not worried about losing.

 

My floppies have seen bazillions of ftp and websites and hard drives come and go.

 

I dont eqaute posting stuff online with 'rescuing' it, as you know there is no gurantee you will always have access to someones archive.. I just call it sharing..

 

Many sites these days activley try to prevent you archiving their archive with automation.

 

Show me those Atari 8 bit sites and I will download them.

Most everything is in the public domain now.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Yeah I think we can squeeze every 8 bit file ever written into 1.5TB about 400 times over.

 

I am currently downloading the Umich.edu site if it breaks 20mb I'd be shocked

 

 

 

 

Maybe every 8-bit file... but um... go take a look at pigwa, all atari related stuff... I've got 50-something gigabytes queued from their atari folder and I only have 'collections' 'emulators_and_utils' and 'mirror' queued. I skipped 'audio' and haven't queued 'other' 'parties' 'photos_and_videos' 'projects' or 'video streams' yet. I will be skipping 'potos_and_videos' 'parties' and 'video streams' but I still need to queue 'other', 'projects' and audio...

 

I've currently download tens of thousands of files and have 209k and change queued... so yeahhhh these FTP sites aren't just 20mb of 8-bit files.

Edited by ryanmercer
Link to comment
Share on other sites

The Bit Café. I didn't advertise it much and I only had a single phone line. When I joined the Navy, I packed it up and it was never fired up again due to the internet exploding in popularity. That, and WildCat! being sold to some else, didn't help much.

 

I'm rebuilding the system as I type this. It will be running Synchronet on FreeBSD. Disk space has increased in size over the years (I started with a 10GB HDD), and also lowered in cost. The Internet is not how it use to be, with Net Neutrality, monitoring, and excessive crap spewing everywhere. I think BBS's will eventually take off once again in a different form once everyone gets sick of the corporate bull.

 

Simba7, what was your old BBS name?

  • Like 2
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

Loading...
  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
×
×
  • Create New...