First post, by doshea
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From time to time there are posts asking about whether anyone can find a particular piece of old software given its name and perhaps its developer. Sometimes there are even harder questions about whether there is any software utility for older operating systems which has a particular set of features. Sometimes we have some answers, but other times we only have some hints, or perhaps know of something related which might not be the best option. I have some ways to try to find software myself, but it's time-consuming and I'd prefer to just write up some hints about how I do it which others can hopefully follow, rather than do the work for them. Does anyone know of any existing guides for this kind of thing?
Here are my techniques for finding software if I know what it is called, or perhaps if I have some very specific keywords like it's for dealing with files in a specific, rare, named file format. I find these more useful than general web searches because they will often pick up some modern software with the same name or feature. The intent here is to find freeware, shareware or open source tools. Commercial software wouldn't appear in most of these searches.
- Google search with "site:cd.textfiles.com" in the search keywords, which effectively limits the search to old shovelware CDs
- Search on http://discmaster.textfiles.com
- Search on https://archive.org, and possibly once search results are returned limit the results to "Media Type:" "software" or similar.
- Search in the PC-SIG Library: https://archive.org/details/PC-Sig_Library_13 … ion_PC-SIG_1994 seems to be the latest release that is available although according to Wikipedia there was a 14th edition. It has a catalog and also has the software. There are numerous older releases available on the same site, and also some more restricted games and utilities CD-ROMs.
- Search in the PC-SIG Encyclopedia of Shareware, which was a physical book: https://archive.org/details/pcsigencyclopedi0 … e_k3k1/mode/2up seems to be the latest release that is available online but I know there was a 4th edition. There are also older editions available on archive.org. Hopefully there isn't anything in here which isn't also in the PC-SIG Library CD-ROM though, except in cases where they deleted some entries from their catalog. Finding something here which wasn't on the CD-ROMs would be pretty disappointing because you've only found evidence that the software existed, but not found the software itself.
This is how I find software which performs a particular function based on some more vague keywords like "windows api trace":
- books.google.com search with intitle:"PC Mag" in the search keywords (this gives results from PC Magazine - I'm not sure why the titles all seem to say "PC Mag"), then before clicking through to the results, try to focus on results from issues in relevant years, e.g. early to mid 1990s for Windows 3.x things. Alternatively use https://books.google.com/advanced_book_search, put "PC Mag" (with the quotes) in the "Title" field, use the "Publication Date" control to narrow the search range, and put some keywords in the fields at the top. This will of course only give you the names and versions of software to find.
- Go to cd.textfiles.com (or alternatively have your own local copies of shovelware CDs) and take a look at the listings in popular collections like simtel, CICA, garbo, etc. It would be good to provide some hints as to which collections are good for what purposes. There are often multiple releases of each, so check some CD-ROMs which are from relevant years. Often there is a 00GLOBAL.TXT file with an index of everything in the (possibly multiple-CD) release, but these can be quite large and take a while to search if you have only vague keywords. It can be useful to try to find a category-specific directory - e.g. http://cd.textfiles.com/simtel/simtel20/MSDOS/MENU/ - and then look at its 00_INDEX.TXT or similar file to narrow down your search. Some CD-ROMs just don't have text files listing the directory contents, though, and aren't very useful for searching in this way.
- http://discmaster.textfiles.com as referenced above is able to search most or all of the CDs on cd.textfiles.com, but since it also searches inside .zip files you'll get a lot more matches, which can be a good thing or a bad thing depending on how specific your search terms are.
- The PC-SIG Library/Encyclopedia are again useful here for searching and/or reading categorised listings of software.
It would be great if someone (maybe http://discmaster.textfiles.com) did a better job of indexing old shareware/freeware utilities by extracting the FILE_ID.DIZ files from them and indexing them. Maybe this wouldn't work as well as I hope for though.
