Dan’s 20th Century Abandonware
Dan collects and preserves commercial legacy software titles from their original commercial media only, n oting that there is no moral, nostalgic, useful or historical value in preserving illegal pirated "warez" copies. All copyright laws are observed in this endeavor.
Also includes in the archive are some of the more rare shareware, freeware and Public Domain software titles.
Before being added to Dan's legacy software collection, each individual title is tested for completeness, media defects and malware. If a title is not complete, has unreadable media, or has unremovable malware, it does not become a part of Dan's 20th Century Abandonware. In order to test the legacy software programs in this collection, he has had to acquire many vintage and some very rare computer hardware systems. A legacy computer hardware section was created to allow visitors to view photos and learn about these classic computers. Many of these systems are very hard to find today and have a significant historical value.
In addition to preserving legacy software, Dan has also undertaken the project to allow visitors to his website to see what many of these software programs look like running in their native formats. D2CA's Screen Shot Gallery is a series of pages featuring select "exhibits" of screen shots and descriptions of programs from this collection. It's like an on-line software museum built into the site!
While collecting rare legacy computer software and hardware, he has also uncovered many other historic "artifacts" from computer eras long since past; hardware components, computer storage media, historical publications, etc. These items are featured on Dan's 20th Century Abandonware as "computer artifacts."
The software titles that make up this legacy software collection are releases dating from the early 1980's up to and including versions released in the year 2000, the end of the 20th Century - the "golden age" of personal computing -- CP/M, DOS, GEM, Commodore GEOS, PC GeoWorks, OS/2, Windows, BeOS, DeskMate, DESQview, Mac OS 6.x and later, etc.
The term "abandonware" illustrates that these legacy software titles are "abandoned" as far as technical support and retail sale. The original businesses that created many of these legacy software titles no longer exist. Some have been gone for decades.
If you need legacy software you can visit D2CA's Legacy Software Catalogs page or the Surplus Legacy Software page and contact Dan for information on how to acquire these titles.
For more information, visit:
http://www.d2ca.org/site-map.html
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