A mint sealed copy of Encarta 98

Small teaser for latest software acquisition...

Received earlier this week:

I have two compatible machines on that list, hopefully atleast one of them still works...

Some tasty CD-ROMs with SC-88 MIDI files on them:

They also include software players for those that do not actually own a module, and although Windows gets the VSC-88, it includes Roland "MIDIgraphy 1.3.4" for the Mac (Mac OS 6, more modern versions can be downloaded from Roland's websites), and from vol. 2 onwards "HI-RO Player" for Windows 95 (maker's website on archive.org), and on vol. 3 "TMIDI Player" for Windows 95.

I got lucky and found an auction on Y! Auctions Japan that wasn't priced like the things were made of gold.

Money 95
The quest for Access, Powerpoint, Plus! 95/98 continues.

🤣, damn, how many full editions of Microsoft productivity suites are you going for? 😜 Very awesome!

Hope you get that copy of MS Access. For how poorly it is regarded in IT these days (and deservedly so, given how people "abused" it to create ad-hoc databases and such things running on "servers" on the network kept under random so-and-so's desk), I have to say it still does have some weird nostalgic draw for me. The ease with which you could whip up some database with a reasonably easy to use set of custom forms to manage that data, and generate reports from that data ... for all it's technical faults, it does also seem like something that has still not yet been replicated in a better way today.

Gered wrote on 2020-06-15, 01:14:

🤣, damn, how many full editions of Microsoft productivity suites are you going for? 😜 Very awesome!

Thank you, actively collecting just 95 and 2002.

I share your sentiments regarding Access. It was a fine tool for its time, very accessible 😁 and comparably easy to learn.

More Linux distros, or should i say, more Red Hat!

Nice! Old Linux distro's are something I've not yet explored, and feel like I probably should.

Also that Walnut Creek CD-ROM ... heh... reminds me that there was apparently a Walnut Creek CD-ROM with the DJGPP toolchain and a bunch of related tools (NASM, RHIDE, etc), libraries (Allegro) and documentation on it from 1998/1999 or so. It's one of the few remaining retro development tools I've been looking for....

Check on archive.org, they have a lot of Walnut Creek discs:
https://archive.org/details/software?and%5B%5 … n=&sort=&page=1
https://archive.org/details/walnutcreekcdrom

Yeah it is definitely on there. That archive is the only reason I actually knew such a CD existed in the first place. But I want the real thing, in my hands, haha. 😀

The CD also includes the full FreeBSD 2.2.5, but what makes it interesting is the other stuff!

And a handful of coverdiscs from the japanese Mac Power magazine

didn't technically buy it... our office is moving soon and I'm clearing out old stuff before they throw it away and found this ^^

20 discs? Wow, that's awesome. 😀 If you have the time to list them out, I'd love to know all the discs are that are included in that pack.

I'll check tomorrow, it's mostly SDK stuff and windows NT I think... also I just realized Microsoft has a really questionable logo design there.

Sealed for 21e incl. shipping

we used to throw out MSDN cdroms by the thousands. they would show up like every month. NT4 in swahili and every other language you could think of. etc etc etc.

Gered wrote on 2020-08-18, 01:07:

20 discs? Wow, that's awesome. 😀 If you have the time to list them out, I'd love to know all the discs are that are included in that pack.

unfortunately it's indeed mostly just different language versions ^^
but eh I saw a Win 3.1/3.11 CD and was like "I'll take it"
There doesn't seem to be a disc 7 of 20, so either that's missing, or the "development library" is disc 7? though that one has a big "9" printed on it for some reason... but has "October 1994" printed on it too so seems to belong to this pack

"Development Library" disc with no number but a big "9" printed on it
Diisc 1 of 20 - Setup, SDKs and DDKs
Disc 2 of 20 - Win32 SDK and Windows NT DDK for Windows NT 3.1
Disc 3 of 20 - Windows NT Service Packs
Disc 4 of 20 - Additional Windows NT Service Packs, 32-bit SDKs, and 32-bit DDKs
Disc 5 of 20 - Windows 3.1 and Windows for Workgroups 3.11
Disc 6 of 20 - Windows 3.11, and additional 16-bit SDKs and DDKs
Disc 7 of 20 is missing?
Disc 8 of 20 - Windows NT 3.5 (Japanese Beta 1)
Disc 9 of 20 - Win32 SDK (Japanese Beta 1) for Windows NT 3.5
Disc 10 of 20 - Windows NT 3.1 (U.S.)
Disc 11 of 20 - Windows NT 3.1 (French)
Disc 12 of 20 - Windows NT 3.1 (German)
Disc 13 of 20 - Windows NT 3.1 (Spanish)
Disc 14 of 20 - Windows NT 3.1 (Italian)
Disc 15 of 20 - Windows NT 3.1 (Portuguese)
Disc 16 of 20 - Windows NT 3.1 (Swedish)
Disc 17 of 20 - Windows NT 3.1 (Dutch)
Disc 18 of 20 - Windows NT 3.1 (Finnish)
Disc 19 of 20 - Windows NT 3.1 (Norwegian)
Disc 20 of 20 - Windows NT 3.1 (Danish)

Ohh, haha, welp, that is significantly less interesting than I had hoped. 🤣. I guess I was just kinda shocked that they were shipping 20 CDs in MSDN at that point. Thanks for listing them out! 😀

This took forever to arrive, but it finally did. Everything coming out of the U.S. has been super slow to arrive for me (still waiting on a couple things since May), but anything coming from any other part of the world seems to still arrive within a reasonable amount of time. Meh. Oh well.

I wanted 4.x as it still supports Windows 3.1. Though unfortunately this copy does not include the 4.0.1 update which fixes issues running on machines with more than 1GB of RAM, but that's not the end of the world really. Still can apply that update separately.