Macintosh Magazine Media: 1 million files

I am proud to announce that my Macintosh Magazine Media project has surpassed my self-imposed goal of 1 million files, an achievement that fills me with both immense satisfaction and slight bewilderment.

If you’ve never heard of it before: it’s an archive of vintage media containing mostly Macintosh files sourced from Japanese magazines, but featuring content from all over the world. A treasure trove time capsule for vintage computer nerds like myself.

If you’re looking for pre-internet vintage TidBITS content there’s a bunch in those million files.

https://cdn.gingerbeardman.com/images/posts/mmm-scatter.png
Distribution of discs by month

Why Japanese? There are a few reasons: when I started out I was looking to see if there was a 1-bit Hanafuda game (Japanese card game) I was going on a hunch that somebody must have made one back in the day even though there was no record of one online. I eventually found one (very satisfying!) and then kept going with the collection as more cool “lost” stuff was rediscovered by me and others.

Also, the Japanese seem to keep their stuff safe for decades and then list them for sale in bulk packages. This is quite unusual compared to how people keep and sell stuff in my country, the UK. So they were somewhat easy to buy when I started out nobody else was buying them (this is no longer true).

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This is really quite impressive! I haven’t had time to delve into it deeply, but I definitely want to read about your process(es) as much as to explore some of the content! Congratulations on your milestone!

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Cheers! It’s a great feeling when you (re)discover something in the files.

It also makes me realise how comprehensive the collection is. Fonts, icons, specific versions of software, certain artists, demos of games that were never released, things that were thought to have been lost forever, time/event-specific files, and so on.

This project was started in lockdown so it feels like at least something useful came from that period.

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