If you miss the old magazine cover-mounted demo disks of yore, the dominant channel for discovering new apps and games before the broadband internet age, be assured that many of these artifacts are preserved on the Internet Archive. Earlier today, our sister site PC Gamer revealed that there is now a treasure trove of its cover disks (floppies, CDs, and DVDs) archived and ready to enjoy.
PC Gamer’s headline highlights the 758 cover disks on the Internet Archive, but there are actually even more gems to be found. Our search uncovered over 1,500 PC Gamer software archives, thanks to a trove of floppy disk offerings from yesteryear. The total collection spans 1.2TB of material, according to the site.
The archive is a nostalgic reminder of the exclusive content these important printed media outlets used to offer. Such was the power of the printed word (plus cover disk) back then, app and games publishers would be eager to write custom demos and editions for the cover disks. PC Gamer highlights a few things, like its exclusive Freedom Force character skins on the June 2002 demo disk.
I remember Amiga Format cover disks going further, with special editions like Christmas Lemmings, Cannon Soccer, and even an exclusive Syndicate level put on cover disks for readers.
While rooting through the Internet Archive’s similar collections, I was also happy to find a bounty of PC Format disks of various eras, ST Format disks, CU Amiga disks, and Computer Shopper disks. There are surely many more - check for your favorite old magazine.
While you are there, browsing software cover disks at the archive, remember that many of the old print magazines have also been preserved. So, you’ll often be able to find both the cover disk and a PDF of the magazine it was originally attached to. That may be useful if a special code or instructions are needed to get the cover disk content up and running.
Internet Archive issues
There’s no doubt the Internet Archive is both a treasure and an important reference, but recent reports suggest its future worth may be being eroded. Last week, we noted that many news outlets were blocking the IA’s Wayback Machine from archiving their pages.
Among the reasons given for the blockages were that some publishers feared AI companies would abuse fair use policies and train their models on the snapshots of old articles. However, the good news is that Wayback Machine director Mark Graham is reportedly in talks with several outlets so that the archiver’s bot can gain access to these websites once more.
