Internet Archive beefs up its free software museum

Aside from its Wayback Machine that gives you a peek at websites from years pasts and its archive of broadcast news content, the Internet Archive is also home to a bevy of old software through its Software Museum.

Now the nonprofit is talking up the Software Museum as one of the largest collections of old software available anywhere, according to Internet Archive’s Jason Scott. That includes recent additions of Shareware CD Archive, TOSEC archive, FTP site boneyard, Disk Drives collection, and a number of classic PC Games. Oh, and its also got quite a collection of instruction manuals for classic devices like the Apple I.

And while it may seem like collecting a bunch of old software is a pointless task, you could easily have someone make the same ignorant argument about any other museum or library.

So what’s next for the Software Museum? Scott said the site currently doesn’t do a very good job of allowing people to search through the collection, and theorized that adding meta data to fix this could be in the museum’s future.

Via Engadget; Photo credit: super-structure/Flickr