Is there list of unarchived / missing software?

[derelictronics]

As I was sorting through piles of floppy disks tonight, I got to wondering if there's a maintained list of programs that have never been archived or have gone missing over time?

Side-rant: I adore archive.org for providing the service that they do. However, I'm annoyed by the lack of standardization of titles, and the lack of the ability to browse / sort in a hierarchical manner, rather than having to search for every title.

 

[krebizfan]

Some of the sites devoted to cataloging software have lists of software being sought but a complete list of everything does not exist. There is also a lot of software that the owners of those sites have never heard of before so it is unlikely for there to be plans to locate those.

 

[SomeGuy]

I think you underestimate how much floppy software was produced and how much of it has been forgotten and disappeared.

Off hand, there were huge numbers of "budget" titles that never got a single mention in any published book or magazine, large amounts of corporate drek produced that would have been useless to outsiders, and vast amounts of forgotten shareware.

There were packaged business titles what would make people's brains shrivel up, such as medical office management software, payroll software, scientific analysis software, development software, and so on, that either found their way to the trash or the disks got reformatted to hold games.

Even well known titles had multiple minor revisions, repackaging, special editions, OEM editions, language releases, and alternate platform releases.

On top of that, even what is out there often needs "redumps" as well as label and manual scans.

If you do have something that you think needs to be archived, please do hop over to one of the sites that does that and contribute.

 

[lafos]

Such a list would be daunting. I have hunted for software on-line. There are several sites, all independent of each other, and no comprehensive catalog of contents. And I doubt that there ever was a list of all software produced. Tandy had published a catalog sometime in the 80's, and copies may be on-line somewhere.

Might be best to think of computer software (and hardware) in a similar way as the plant and animal species on Earth. Even with the billions of living species today, over 99% of all species are extinct, according to the scientists that study such things.

 

[hargle]

As someone who is actively working on a large DOS archiving project, you really can't figure out what has/has not been accounted for by hand. For example, looking at some list, you may see that "space quest" has been archived, but you might have an extremely rare copy of space quest version 3.14 which is unknown to any archive out there, and it would be too easy to dismiss that your copy is the same as the one in a listing.

The only way to really do it is to archive every single disk you have and then examine that data to do comparisons on it against a database of known titles and see what falls out from there.

 

[Xacalite]

There is that precious "Mobygames" site...
I hope some day somebody creates a more general "Mobysoftware".

 

[Unknown_K]

Quite a bit of effort was expended saving games then run of the mill productivity apps.

 

[JohnElliott]

Maybe setting up a wiki's the way to go, and try and build up some momentum. Though even so I suspect it would end up as a list of abstruse wishlists. If I was involved you might find a list of versions of the Amstrad PCW boot floppies, for example.