Mastodawn

The 500 Hats of LambdaCalculus

Just uploaded a (hopefully!) complete mirror of the University of Michigan's old software archives to the Internet Archive, as the original server seems to have finally gone down.

The U-M Archive contained software for Atari computers (8-bit, ST, TT, and Falcon), Apple II computers, classic Mac OS, DOS, and Unix X11 software, but its draw was software for Apollo graphical workstations, which everyone can read about here! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Computer

The entire archive is currently up at the Internet Archive as one huge tar.gz archive, and I'll be uploading the entire collection uncompressed for anyone who wants to browse it easier.

https://archive.org/details/u-mich-archives

Apollo Computer - Wikipedia

Stefan Prandl Aug 30, 2023

@LambdaCalculus that some True Hero Of The Net stuff you’ve done there 😄 I’ll be having a poke for sure!

The 500 Hats of LambdaCalculus Aug 30, 2023

@redezem Give me some time to also upload the loose files and a zip archive as well!

Feoh Aug 30, 2023

@LambdaCalculus Very cool. Thank you for the hard work!

Can't tell you how often I think back to the early days of the net, when knowing where to find things was an art, and big FTP sites like this were the bread and butter of the day.

ftp.cs.umich.edu
wuarchive.wustl.edu
ftp.uu.net
...

MEEE-MOO-RIES! :)

The 500 Hats of LambdaCalculus Aug 30, 2023

@feoh I also saved this because I'm sure a lot of this software may not be available elsewhere, especially all of that Apolo software!

If there's an emulator for the Apollo computers, this is a way of users to get software to run on said emulators!

Feoh Aug 30, 2023

@LambdaCalculus Awesome!

Would be interesting to compare what's there with The Apollo Archive: https://jim.rees.org/apollo-archive/

I never ran DomainOS myself but I heard so much spoken about it in nothing but reverent tones it seems like an excellent candidate for preservation!

Apollo Archive

Large Format Projectionist Aug 30, 2023

@LambdaCalculus
Gawd, I downloaded a lot of stuff from them back in the 90’s and early 2000’s. Thank you for saving that.

Ernie Smith Aug 30, 2023

@LambdaCalculus Nice save!

@LambdaCalculus

attn @hyc - should see some familiar names in this tarball

Howard Chu @ Symas Aug 30, 2023

@w8emv @LambdaCalculus ah, back when we were maintainers of the foremost Atari software archive on the internet. Good times. Computers were more fun back then...

Christian Lynbech Aug 31, 2023

@hyc @w8emv @LambdaCalculus I sure have spent some time browsing those archives!

Thanks for making this available.

@LambdaCalculus

nice! I was there when the software collection started in 1985.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/edward-vielmetti/53151582016/in/datetaken/

UMich Computing Center Newsletter v16n2, 1986-01-20

Flickr

Howard Chu @ Symas Aug 30, 2023

@w8emv @LambdaCalculus I thought you started it in the first place? I remember grubbing thru PC1: in the early years when I still worked on MS-DOS, before diving into Atari...

@hyc @LambdaCalculus

I started the MS-DOS collection at UMich and PC1 and the PC1 Confer conference. As I remember it, Richard Conto had already been collecting CP/M software for at least a little while before I got to do the same thing for MS-DOS.

Which reminds me, I need to talk to Gavin.

Howard Chu @ Symas Aug 30, 2023

@w8emv @LambdaCalculus oh geeze, I'd forgotten about the CP/M archive. I trawled thru there a few times too. Mainly looking for cool stuff to port to the Atari ST.

@hyc @LambdaCalculus

I remember the early days as being days of figuring out compression and archiving tools (.arc was first but not the only) and getting modem programs to go at maximum speed over non-transparent networks.

Kermit was slower than most, but it supported batch transfers, so you could point it a directory and have it pull the whole thing down, instead of file by file.

There should also be an early KA9Q NOS in this collection, which is where I learned TCP/IP a packet at a time.

Dan Oachs Aug 30, 2023

@LambdaCalculus Did the original servers go down, or is it because of this... https://umich.edu/announcements/

Still a good thing either way :)

University of Michigan

University of Michigan is one of the top universities of the world, a public institution of higher learning, fostering excellence in research. U-M provides outstanding undergraduate, graduate and professional education, serving the local, regional, national and international communities.

@doachs @LambdaCalculus

Yeah, UMich networks have had a few bad days (#goblue #hugops). A lot of the network is offline which is somewhat inconvenient to say the least on the first week of classes.

The Michigan Daily has the story

https://www.michigandaily.com/news/massive-wifi-outage-at-umich-affects-all-three-u-m-campuses/

Massive IT outage continues to affect all three UMich campuses

Online services including wifi are out on all three campuses at the University of Michigan as of Sunday afternoon.

The Michigan Daily

The 500 Hats of LambdaCalculus Aug 30, 2023

@w8emv @doachs There have been hints thrown around as well that U of Mich doesn't seem to be too concerned in keeping this archive around:

https://web.archive.org/web/20230103183151/http://websites.umich.edu/~archive/

Either way, it's better to have saved it before all this happened than find out later that someone decided to yank it offline for good without it having been mirrored.

Digital Mark λ ☕️ 🕹 👽Aug 30, 2023

@LambdaCalculus I spent so much time leeching ST files from umich over the University's small data line, then taking the files home on floppy to serve on my BBS.

Jason Levine Aug 30, 2023

@LambdaCalculus I presume you’ve read that UM had to literally disable its campus network connections to the internet this week due to a cybersecurity issue they’re not really talking about… which is to say, the original server might not be down, it might just be lonely on the disconnected campus network right now.

The 500 Hats of LambdaCalculus Aug 30, 2023

@delfuego I have read about the attack, but the original page had been hinting that the archives had been teetering to life and that U-M could pull the plug if no one stepped up to maintain the archive.

So rather than sit back and let it potentially disappear one day, I decided to take action and save it all.

Jason Levine Aug 30, 2023

@LambdaCalculus Hell yeah! To be clear, I wasn't questioning the value of getting it all up into the IA, I was just hopeful that maybe the OG server was just down because of the cyber attack, and not permanently.

The 500 Hats of LambdaCalculus Aug 30, 2023

@delfuego Hopefully it's not permanently, but better safe than sorry.

Jeff McNeill Aug 30, 2023

@LambdaCalculus how large is the zip?

@LambdaCalculus ooh, giving this a download now.

Jyrgen N Aug 30, 2023

@LambdaCalculus The Apollo logo is stunning. I also liked the machines; the research group where I worked as a student 35 years ago had two DN3000s by way of Mentor Graphics. I only played a bit with them, not able to appreciate at the time how rare this opportunity was (Aegis!). I was fascinated how I could telnet into the VAX from an Apollo and then back into the Apollo. My mind was boggled by these first experiences with networking — we didn’t have Internet then.
(Edit: 35 years)

Jasonology Aug 31, 2023

@LambdaCalculus I was just thinking about this archive a few weeks ago, and tried looking it up. Nice work rescuing it!