Discmaster

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The Legendary Troll Kingdom
Check this out.

http://discmaster.textfiles.com/

The Internet Archive is a repository of terabytes of data from thousands of CDs and floppy discs, and some of it can be hard to sort through. Files in the archive could contain anything—music, text documents, ancient memes, and old flash animations—and until recently, the only way to figure out what data was on these ancient CDs was to download it and pray you had the software to render it into readable material. DiscMaster just changed all that.

DiscMaster is a new website that is sifting through the CDs and floppy disks in the Internet Archive and making it all into a searchable database. Even more incredibly, it’s taking all of the old file formats and making them viewable in a browser. As of this writing, the archive represents more than 7,000 CDs and 11 million files.

“For a specific group of people this will revolutionize their relationship to the archive,” Jason Scott, an archivist at the Archive and spokesperson for DiscMaster, told Motherboard. “This will be an endless font of information. This will be the biggest thing I’ll work on this year.”

Scott said that DiscMaster is a labor of love from an Archive fan who made contact through Discord. They’d been working on DiscMaster for 18 months when they finally put out the call for help. Scott said he was blown away. “The program is pulling apart every archive,” he said. “It is generating easy to use programs that can preview the material easily.”

One of the most difficult parts of looking through old files is the formats. In the early Wild West days of the online world there were no standardized file formats, no set way to render a video, no agreed upon audio codec, and no single way to render text. Looking through old files requires you to identify these ancient formats and figure out a way to render them in a modern browser.

DiscMaster does all that for you and it works in both modern and legacy browsers. Scott said that means someone on an old Commodore 64 with a browser can surf to DiscMaster and view old files without any hassle. And anyone using the latest version of Chrome can view the same file without much trouble. “This thing is a beast,” he said. “It’s 11 terabytes of data right now.”
 
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