Tag: internetarchive

Webdepths: Roadmap to the Information Superhighway, Spring 1995

The World Wide Web is now over thirty years old. In that time, more content has vanished from it than remains now, but some of it can still be dredged up from the shadowy archives of the Wayback Machine. This is the latest chapter in our never-ending search to find the cool gaming stuff that time forgot….

Microsoft pioneered a form of hypertext that came onto the scene around the same time that HTML, the format that web browsers read and display, did. As sometimes happens with Microsoft, they didn’t really understand what they had there, and relegated it to a format for help files, called WinHelp, which debuted on Windows 3.0.

HTML unquestionably won out over it, but the WinHelp format, extension .htp, and its successor Compiled HTML Help or CHM, has some advantages. Both are self-contained, bundling all of the individual pages of the help system into a single file, and didn’t need network access to read them. That ease of transport meant in the early days of the World Wide Web you could sometimes find downloadable Windows Help files, and that’s the format that the “Roadmap to the Information Superhighway” was released in.

The Roadmap, from Spring 1995. Just take a moment to bask in that green-on-bright-cyan text.

In the early years of the Web it quickly became obvious that there was a great need to enhance findability, that the greatest website in the world was useless if no one knows it exists. The Roadmap, and the previous year’s upstart Yahoo (later called Yahoo Directory) were two attempts to combat the obscurity problem. I insist that this problem has always been with us, that the creation and rapid adoption of Google just made it less obvious for a while, and now that the Goog’s enshittified its bed, entering its dotage and embracing “AI,” it’s become more visible how difficult it is to find interesting things online. (It’s why I’m still a devoted Metafilter member and poster even now, 27 years after its creation.)

The Roadmap to the Information Superhighway (it calls itself the Official Roadmap) is mostly a list of tutorials and links. It is so old that it refers to “the Mosaic,” Mosaic being the first popular web browser. Yet even back then enshittification was still present in online spaces, and this edition of the Roadmap was deep into it, so some of the links you click on will open up, in its own window, an ad for its “Internet Yellow Pages.” They were double-dipping: the Roadmap itself cost money, $39 for a subscription, which is probably why it was supplanted by Yahoo, and even print listings of websites.

A portion of the Roadmap’s section on Gopher

In 1995 the Web had only been around for five years or so, and substantial portions of it were still accessible only through protocols like News, Gopher, Telnet and even web BBSes, so a portion of its text went to explaining how to use these services. There’s even a page on how to use Finger, which being a very Unixy thing, was something a lot of people just didn’t use even then.

I’d like to someday go through all its links and find out what percentage of them, but even then there were a lot of websites, and yet I fear the proportion of them that are still active is depressingly low. I’ve complained here before how some people still seem to think the internet is forever, when it is really really not, we’ve lost countless pages and sites, and the Internet Archive’s collection of them is spotty. It’s a miracle that it exists at all, and they are well-deserving of your donation dollars, if you can spare a few. It’s a miracle that they host the copy of the Roadmap that I link above.

A hint to browsing the roadmap from WINE, at least one of its links, the one reading What Is the Internet Superhighway?, crashes its Help reader when I open it.

To return to the phenomenon of WinHelp, the original Windows Help stopped being bundled with Windows Vista, and Windows 10 completely dropped support for it. You can still load Help files, like the Roadmap, on Linux systems using WINE, and that’s where my screenshots come from. Isn’t it just like Microsoft to invent a technology that other people now support far better than they do?

Results of Discmaster Jam 2025

We’ve posted before here of Diskmaster, a search engine that works on the contents of old CD-ROM file compilations. Diskmaster has gone away and come back at least once, maybe twice, but for the moment at least is up.

Discmaster Jam is a gamejam where participants are asked to make use of contents found on the CDs the Discmaster searches. The winners were judged by a number of Industry People, so you can expect a certain minimum level of quality from those. The list of submissions on itch.io’s page for the jam has a number of extra items on it, to peruse and examine.

Image from the site

One entry that stands out in my vision is “Where In The World Is That #@*% Owl!?” which was written for the somewhat-obscure ACT Apricot computer from the UK, which had monochrome, yet high-resolution, graphics

Image from the itch page for Where In The World Is That #@*% Owl!?

Of note: it turns out one of the disks that Discmaster searches is the original CD version of Loadstar Compleat! So that is another way you could satisfy a jonesing for C64 program action. If you see me report on a Loadstar program of interest, you could possibly find it there, in addition to the Loadstar Compleat compilation I’ve made for itch.io.

Learning Zork Implementation Language, by Steve Meretzky

Back in the days of hallowed Infocom, the people who made a living making text adventures better than anyone else ever has before or since, life was often pretty harrowing. They had some huge hits, like Zork, Planetfall and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, but as time passed and graphic adventures took up more and more of the market, It became harder to make the case for a purely textual medium.

Infocom tried different things to diversify, like a weird computer and board game called Fooblitzky, and an office software package called Cornerstone. In the end they got bought out by Activision, which had renamed itself to “Mediagenic.” But that’s a story for another time.

There was a period where earlier Implementors, or “imps,” had left the company, so it was left to remaining employee Steve Meretzsky, the creator of the afore-mentioned Planetfall, and co-author with Douglas Adams of the Hitchhiker’s Guide game, to write a manual to tell new hires how to use their bespoke development tool, ZIL, to make text adventure games.

This is that manual (78 pages), preserved on the Internet Archive. And it’s great! Steve had made multiple successful games with it and knew his stuff. He didn’t know everything about it, and at multiple points appeals to a mystery Stu, who was probably Stu Galley, fellow imp. We don’t know if he ever filled in those holes when talking to people. Stu passed away in 2018, so I guess it’s a moot point now.

Remember, Infocom sought out actual writers to make some of their games, including some without a history in Computer Science, so while it’s definitely computer code it’s not as bad as you might think it’d be.

Meretzky is a fine and funny writer, and his personality shines through the document. And he’s a good teacher too, I feel like I could use this to make games with ZIL, while Inform 7, while I understand it is also great and has extensive documentation with lots of examples, I couldn’t handle.

ZIL is a Lisp-like language, where everything is lists. It compiles to “Z-code,” a virtual machine that was run by Infocom’s interpreter (which is the secret of their many ports to different computer platforms of that era), and of which there are now many different free and open source ports like Frotz and Gargoyle. So you could use this to write a ZIL game, use ZILF and ZAPF to build it, and run it in Frotz. As Exercise Three in the manual, Meretzsky tasks the read with building a complete game, collaborating with the Infocom marketing department to design a box for it, and then selling 250,000 copies. That’s pretty difficult since Infocom is gone and it’s essentially impossible now to sell text adventures for money. Maybe you’ll find a way.

Learning ZIL, or, Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Writing Interactive Fiction But Couldn’t Find Anyone Still Working Here To Ask (Internet Archive, PDF)

Frank Herbert’s Book on Computers

Frank Herbert, of course, is the person who created and wrote the first Dune books. You remember Dune, don’t you? Paul Atreides, Muad’Dib, Bene Gesserit, Baron Harkonen, etc? Notably, in the backstory to his sci-fi epic masterpiece, there was a time called the Butlerian Jihad, where all computers and robots were destroyed and it was declared taboo to create a machine to do the thinking of a human being. These days, doesn’t seem like such a bad idea!

Well he was a bit of a tech enthusiast at the time, and he wrote a book about computers, possibly to try to not get too full of themselves, entitled “Without Me You’re Nothing: The Essential Guide to Home Computers.” The computers in question are Apple IIs and Atari 8-bits, so it may seem kind of quaint today. Also, the link is on the Internet Archive, and it’s one of those funky books that you have to “check out,” for about an hour, because every viewed copy is backed up by a physical edition they have in holding. You know, because publishers suck!

Still, for periods of an hour at a time, it is a portal into a simpler time, where computers typically had 64 kilobytes of memory or less. Will they inspire you to destroy all thinking machines and train a cadre of people to do complex math in their heads? I’m going to guess no, even though Apple products are one of the subjects of the book. In order to be inspired really loathe computers, I think you have to have at least a 300-baud modem.

Without me you’re nothing: the essential guide to home computers, by Frank Herbert (archive.org, 307 pages[!], readable for periods of one hour at a time)

GifCities

GeoCities has been gone for fifteen years now, about as long as it was alive, and it’s still sorely missed. It was shut down by Yahoo, which seems to exist purely to kill good things during downturns. (See also: Yahoo Directory.) It’s just a “brand” now; the company formerly known as that changed its name to “Altaba,” and then itself died.

GeoCities was a place where anyone could make a static website, for free (although with frames and ads). This isn’t the place to recount the full story, but at the time it had kind of a reputation. Since anyone could make a site there, and having a site was a big thing in those heady early World Wide Web days, a lot of people did make them. It was their first site in a lot of cases; in many cases, it was their only site. And before social media and Google’s decay, you could even reasonably expect to find GeoCities sites, if they were good.

So a lot of web newbies made sites, and they perpetrated all kinds of design atrocities in the process. Back then we rolled our eyes and held our noses, but now that time is remembered with fondness.

There are multiple places where you can go back and explore old GeoCities sites, although with varying degrees of stability. Try checking Restorativland or Oocities. Or the Internet Archive’s GeoCities collection.

One of the most egregious of the many sins made by GeoCities users was the overuse of animated GIFs. GIFs themselves are their own throwback to the early era, and actually predate the World Wide Web. The image format was created at Compuserve in 1987, while the first web browser was released on Christmas Day, 1990. Now Compuserve is long gone, although their website, amazingly, is still up, offering an early 2000’s style web portal experience, and while it’s likely no one human is curating its links, some one, or thing, is still updating its copyright date.

I seem to be discursing a lot today, but I am actually closing in on today’s true subject, just with a flight plan best described as a wide, lazy spiral. Here we go. GIFs, that relic of ancient Compuserve, once the subject of an infamous software patent owned by even older pre-web tech company Unisys that threatened to strike the format from the internet, is the only thing of Compuserve that really thrives today.

There are other animation file formats. There’s MP4 and its progeny, of course. Google has a version of webp that has animation, but people don’t trust Google so much anymore. GIFs are also limited: it’s an indexed graphics format that maxes out at 256 colors. But there are many ways to make them, all the major browsers support them, many social media sites support them, and they doesn’t have Google’s sterile, chlorine-like stink about them, so they survive. Improbably, awesomely, people still make, use and view GIFs today.

Google Meetup(?)’s message input bar with GIF button
Discord’s message input bar with GIF button

Google Meetup, or whatever the hell they call it now, has an interface for searching for GIFs to use, and Discord does too. There’s a site, the slightly-incorrectly named GIPHY, that hosts them and lets you search for them. Arguably GIFs are more popular than ever. But the acknowledged Golden (well, maybe Tarnished Bronze) Age of GIFs was the Geocitiene Era.

Well, now the Internet Archive has an amusingly-styled site, GifCities, where you can search through an archives of the GeoCities site collection.

Comic Sans! A spinning rendered dollar sign! Party like it’s 200X!

It doesn’t seem to have a lot to go by when doing its text search? My “Nethack” search only turned up two GIFs, both found from the term’s inclusion in their origin URLs. These are them:

I don’t get that eye one, but the second one’s kind of snazzy, if not really that useful. Still-someone worked to construct each of them, and I like that their work is commemorated, and even available for others to use today. Most of the Old Web, by weight, is lost now, so let’s cherish what remains.

4am’s Crack of Spare Change

Spare Change is an odd little Apple II game from 1983, where the player tries to thwart mischievous creatures who escaped from an arcade game, who are trying to steal quarters from the machines. One of Broderbund’s earlier hits, although it never gained the recognition of Lode Runner.

Such a charming little game
Do you not only understand this, but enjoy reading it? Then this should be very interesting to you.

Spare Change, in addition to its various little features like animated intermissions and customizable difficulty, also had a pretty strong copy protection scheme. These schemes served to prevent casual copying at the time (although cracks of all the popular titles inevitably started making the rounds on BBSes), but also serve to work against software preservation. Spare Change is 40 years old now, and disks fail frequently. There is an available crack, but it’s said to be missing an important feature: it fails to save their high scores to disk.

4am is the famed preserver of classic Apple II software, performed by dint of figuring out their protection and removing it as unobtrusively as possible. His account on Twitter (I refuse to call it X, I don’t even like saying Xbox) made for great reading for people of a technical mind. He isn’t on Twitter any more for, I dunno, some reason, but he still posts his cracks, and his explanations for how they work, to the Internet Archive, under the 4am tag.

All this is to say his crack of Spare Change makes for entertaining reading to one of the right mindset. One of you may have it, so here it is.

Space Change: a 4am and san inc crack: description and the crack itself.

Quick Browser-Based Multiplayer Emulation

NES Party and SNES Party are sites that do a think that would have seemed like magic 10 years ago: they make it easy to pick out NES and SNES games, load them into the browser from the Internet Archive, and not only let you play them yourself but share a room link with another person and enable internet-based multiplayer. It’s all as simple as that.

Well, mostly. When I tried using it, emulation was much faster than normal. The game load screen suggests, if this happen, that you reduce the refresh rate of your display, which seems like kind of a kludgy solution. But on the plus side, snes.party has Rampart!

NES Party and SNES Party

The Bolo Home Page, Revived

Bolo is a multiplayer tank game, originally for the BBC Micro but remade for classic Macintosh computers. It was a very popular online kind of game for awhile.

It had a popular resource page on the internet, called the Bolo Home Page, made by Joseph Lo and and Chris Hwang, that began as a student project and migrated to the site lgm.com. But then that site went down, and its domain was bought by squatters. So it goes.

Well, vga256 on Mastodon has remade the Bolo Home Page out of the records kept by the Internet Archive. A site composed of hundreds of static HTML pages has risen from the ashes, all (well most) links fixed up to point internally, its content restored as much as is possible. The Internet Archive, for all its greatness, frequently misses images and even whole pages, so there are holes in its record.

Still, most of its content remains. For people who wish to learn about this classic piece of electronic entertainment, a collection of hundreds of pages awaits you!

I’ve never played Bolo myself, I don’t know much about it, but some people it seems were very enthusiastic about it. I don’t think gameplay goes obsolete, it just falls into and out of fashion. Maybe this is a sign. Maybe it’s time for the Second Age of Bolo to begin.

The Bolo Home Page (restored)

Jason Scott Reminds Us Of Software On Cassette Tapes

I had one of these, although it got pretty decrepit later on. Images here from the article on the Internet Archive.

Commodore users of a certain intersection of class and age will remember the Datasette, a custom tape player that early Vic-20 and C64 users could use to load and save their programs on standard “Compact Cassettes.” This was a very slow process, that was so timing intensive that the C64 had to blank its screen during it, because its graphics chip demanded exclusive access to memory while it got the needed data each frame to render graphics. Of course things were rather different in Europe, where cassette tapes were a much more viable medium, and tape loading could actually be faster than the 1541 disk drive (a notably flawed and slow design).

The Atari 8-bit counterpart to the Datasette

Scott walks through this unique period of home computing history. I still have tapes of old Commodore software lying around (because I rarely can bring myself to throw such things out). Maybe some day, if I can get my old Commodores working and displaying again, I’ll try them out and see if they work.

But fortunately, for commercial cassette software archived on the Internet Archive, you don’t have to go through such lengths! Although you can still wait for software to load if you want to! The IA offers emulated software for both the Sinclair ZX-81 and Commodore 64 that are supplied on virtual tapes, so you too can experience the exciting process of waiting for programs to load. In Scott’s words: “Incomprehensible! Mysterious! Uninformative! Welcome to home computing in the 1980s!“

I notice that much of the Commodore 64 software mentioned in the article actually had tape loading graphics. I can’t explain this. It kind of makes me feel cheated, from the many times I sat watching a blank light-blue screen. Presumably the UK coders who made much tape-based 64 software had, in their tape-loading bag of tricks, a way to overcome the VIC-II’s timing issues. I wouldn’t doubt it.

The Easy Roll and Slow Burn of Cassette-Based Software (Internet Archive)

Total Replay 5.0

Apple II preservationist and awesome human 4am (Mastodon) has released the latest version of Total Replay, a collection of Apple II games that can be played both in emulators and on real systems (provided you have a way to read the hard drive image from your Apple). It can even be played directly over the web on its Internet Archive page.

An important note if you try to load its torrent from the page: that torrent contains a complete history of the project, weighing in at 22 gigabytes, even though Total Replay itself is just 32 megabytes big. If you choose to download that torrent for offline play and are just interested in playing, make sure to uncheck the history folder so you don’t end up downloading a huge amount of files you don’t need.

Total Replay 5.0 archive page (Apple II hard drive image, ProDOS mountable, 32MB), Mastodon post

CD-ROM Compilation Search Engine

Set Side B often verges into adjacent tech areas, especially for older software, especially when those areas happen to contain a lot of games. This is just a note that the always-great Jason Scott of the Internet Archive has a great post about Discmaster, which is hosted at the IA, and is a search engine into the contents of a bunch of old CD-ROM file compilations. Many of these were shareware collections put out by companies like Walnut Creek, intended in the age immediately before the internet to put out collections of shareware, but sometimes bundling freeware, or libre-free software.

The error, presented in class Web Gray and Times New-Roman.

Some of these files are very hard to find on the wider internet. When I visited Discmaster myself it was down for an upgrade (it’s a bad sign when your filesystem runs out of inodes) but I look forward to scouring its archives often in the future!

DiscMaster (Internet Archive)

Apple Kracker’s Guide

Back in the days of the Apple II, there was a thriving scene in trading copies of commercial software. Means to prevent this, through copy protection schemes, were just as rampant, as publishers sought to protect their work from those who would use it without paying. The process of figuring out a disk’s copy protection and making it so it could be copied and run by others was called cracking, or sometimes, kracking.

Cracking was, and still is, a black art. There are many ways to protect a disk from being copied, and just as many to deprotect that data. Some disks remain uncracked to this day. It is the work of Apple II cracker 4am (Mastodon) to try to unlock the data on these rapidly aging pieces of media so they can be preserved. (On 4am, jump to the bottom.)

The Apple II Kracker’s Guide seems to have been written by a anonymous user known as The Disk Jockey. It’s a good overview of basic forms of copy protection and ways to defeat them. A copy is at the Internet Archive, but I encountered it in the collection at bitsavers.org, here. It’s like candy to someone of the right frame of mind. Like me!

Aside: If the name 4am sounds familiar, and you find yourself thinking “Didn’t he used to be on Twitter?” He was. He’s not anymore. This happened several months before the Age of Musk. Twitter’s automated processes decided somehow that a video he tweeted of Apple II software Super Print booting was revenge porn and banned him, even rejecting an appeal. He moved to Mastodon. Now that Twitter is missing half of its employees, situations like this will probably become more common. 4am is not the subject of this post, but if you want to read more about Apple II protection and its breaking, you should follow him on Mastodon. He has about one tenth of the followers there that he had on Twitter, which is a shame.