At his personal blog, video game developer and TidBITS Talk contributor Matt Sephton writes:
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.
Sephton’s project preserves media from Japanese Macintosh magazines published between 1991 and 2002, capturing a period when software distribution primarily occurred via physical media. (The software comes from around the world, so a lot of it is in English.) His collection now contains over 1 million files across 500 CDs, offering a fascinating glimpse into early Mac software development and distribution. What makes this collection particularly valuable is its preservation of both mainstream commercial software demos and numerous small utilities and games that might otherwise have been lost forever. The entire collection is searchable and freely available through the Internet Archive, with additional tools for searching file names (and types and creators) and downloading individual files without grabbing entire disk images.
One thing I recently calculated with the help of DiscMaster is that if you look inside all compressed files/archives across my collection, the 1 million files becomes 30 million files.
I don’t personally have an interest in such loose files and installations from backups like this. But thanks for offering! @help4mac
If you want to share, imaging the whole lot and unloading to internet archive is my recommendation. Somebody at some point might want one of the files you have. If you want to curate you could upload only the things that are missing from places like Macintosh Garden. But that’s some effort.
The CDs in my collection were all curated by the magazines some 30 years ago, and all files are as they were in the original downloads so there is an untainted source of truth to them.
