Apple II Software Preservation Project

[rdippold@qualcomm.com (Ron "Asbestos" Dippold)]

I've seen several posts recently referring to software collections
for the Apple // just gathering dust.

I happen to have a huge collection of Apple // disks (wait, I'm not
bragging, there's a point to this!).  I used to be a software dealer,
so I'd get demos by the bushel.  I'd buy a lot of those that I didn't
get, and I've also acquired some collections recently.  The point of
this post to beg for more, like Oliver Twist.

I am currently engaged in an organized and painstaking cataloging,
restoring, and where possible making disk images of the entire
collection for back up to a 2 gig tape cartridge and eventual
permanent storage on CD.  This also works well with DOS 3.3 Launcher
and my updated Fastboot program.  Where not possible, I'm making
backup copies of the disks to be recopied every several years.  I've
recently revitalized my Apple IIgs with a hard drive and linked it to
my IBM to connect to the Internet, and set up a complete //e system so
that I can use the Wildcard.

It's a rather slow process, and many disks have decayed after a decade
or so, or been damaged in some way, so having multiple copies of each
program helps insure that we get at least one complete version.  And
where the copy protection is particularly nasty, a cracked version can
be permanently archived, while the original can't.  I've got a
Wildcard and some Computist SoftKeys to help crack originals (and I
used to be pretty good at it myself), but things like Wings of Fury
(which uses a strange 18-sector format) are ridiculous.

If you have a software collection that is of decent size or has some
old stuff (the mostly likely to have decayed) and is just laying
around unused, I'm willing to pay shipping and a small fee for your
time.  And/or provide you with disk images of your favorite disks from
the collection which will run on the Apple 2 emulators available.  I'm
more interested in the disks than the docs and boxes, except where
they're necessary, but we can discuss that.  Please email me.

For those who are interested, my final goals at this point are
unclear.  The archive can be used as a great testing bed for any
emulators, but my major goal at this point is to preserve all the
Apple // software I can, on the assumption that there will eventually
be a use for it, and to make sure we don't lose anything, even Stone
of Sysiphus (shudder).





-- 
History repeats itself.  That's one of the things wrong with history.