Not rare, ALL of those were commonly used (ESPECIALLY PHOTOSHOP). Some ebay determination will get you some of these in box form.

leileilol wrote on 2020-10-23, 01:54:

Not rare, ALL of those were commonly used (ESPECIALLY PHOTOSHOP). Some ebay determination will get you some of these in box form.

Yeah, I know they were common. I just don't know how many people actually saved their win95 software until now.

Baoran wrote on 2020-10-23, 00:56:

I came across some old win95 software from 1995-1997 on one of my burned CDs. It was from time period when I was a bad pirate. I […]
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I came across some old win95 software from 1995-1997 on one of my burned CDs. It was from time period when I was a bad pirate. It made me wonder if someone does archive this kind of old software or if it is hard to find these kinds of software still?

I recognized at least these software on the CD:

- Norton Antivirus 2.01
- Qemm 97
- Winzip95
- Wrar 2.01
- Winfax 8.01
- Adobe Photoshop 4.01
- Partition Magix 3.02
- Netscape 4.01
- Delphi 3
- Adobe PageMill 2.0
- Microsoft Frontpage 97
- Adobe Illustrator 7.0
- Corel Print & Photo house

I've got a copy of Delphi 3 Professional (full). It was bookware, ie. it was included on the book's companion CD-ROM for free.
The book in turn was a programming book intended for children/teenager, but also was suitable for grown ups.
It was released in 2000 and has ISBN 9783826606434. It's in German, of course.

If memory serves, later versions of the book included Delphi 7 Personal, which is more limited, but has better support for Window 200o/XP.
As in.: More Common Controls, Manifest support (makes old GDI menu items look like GDI+) etc.
-> Most of this stuff can also manually included in Delphi 2/3. See Re: Programs for building software (dos, windows 9x)

None of those were rare at the time, but some old versions can currently be very hard to acquire. An example of this is old Netscape versions which after the Sillydog archive went down are very hard to track down or just lost forever.

Baoran wrote on 2020-10-23, 03:16:

Yeah, I know they were common. I just don't know how many people actually saved their win95 software until now.

All in a box in my parents garage on the other side of the world.
All written on Kodak gold and silver CD's so some may have suffered from rot but the few I tried last time I went back were ok.

Software that was common in the era when computers were already ubiquitous consumer products just can't be rare.

I've kept everything since 1990 and of course have software before that. Nothing on physical media except DVD and blu-ray movies which I'm still converting to mkv.

Grzyb wrote on 2020-10-23, 11:18:

Software that was common in the era when computers were already ubiquitous consumer products just can't be rare.

You're right. Normally not, no. Though it was very time consuming and tricky to track down older Win32s compatible versions of popular software.
I experienced this myself when I started tracking down early emulators.

Either the homepage was gone, the wayback machine had kept a copy of the homepage iself, but the site used an external server for the zip file - which was not saved, of course.
In the end, you get several dozen sites that all seemingly offer a copy to download, but if yoz try, they redirect to this very same, dead URL.

What you then can do is experimenting.
Change extensions from ZIP to RAR, LZH, LHA, 7Z and hope for a hit when using search engines.
Or you can try altering the file names of newer, available files. foo73b.zip (v7.3b) becomes foo20.zip (v2.0), for example. Or foo20w32.zip, foo20_win32.zip etc.

OK, but my previous post was about COMMON software, ie. products like those mentioned in the original post - off-the-shelf stuff, sold in large quantities.
Early emulators were niche products, only used by a bunch of hobbysts - and such things may indeed be hard to find.

vetz wrote on 2020-10-23, 08:40:

None of those were rare at the time, but some old versions can currently be very hard to acquire. An example of this is old Netscape versions which after the Sillydog archive went down are very hard to track down or just lost forever.

I have mosaic netscape 0.9 beta if that is one of the versions lost.

I'd imagine oldversion.com would have a lot of those listed.