90's Microsoft in 2019
I am reviving microsoft.com from 1999 with some added features such as downloading any old OS or product made by Microsoft that you choose and possibly some other old products that are popular. OS downloads include betas and the same goes for applications.
Link: http://classicwindows.us (https supported for modern browsers/OS's)
Our Discord: https://discord.gg/dmEARjJ
Comments
If you don't have it in there already you might consider adding the old KB archive. There is a compressed copy on archive.org, but it is not easily searchable.
Are you requesting we take that archive and put it all on their KB page from 1999? I think its a good idea however we would need search functions to work. That may require a database to get working.
Is this what you're referring to?
https://archive.org/details/MicrosoftProgramersLibraryV1.3
No, if I found the right link, it would be this: https://archive.org/details/MicrosoftKnowledgeBaseArchive200000Articles
Although those programmer's libraries have some stuff that would be worthwhile to have web-searchable.
I remember seeing someone using AltaVista Personal to index the UTZOO archive, but it would require quite a bit of work to make sure it won't get broken into within hours.
There's a technet CD of the Knowledge Base dated November 1999 on Archive.org
https://archive.org/details/Microsoft_Knowledge_Base_Microsoft_TechNet_November_1999_X05-23435
which should be a little more user-friendly.
The Technet CD installs a dedicated CD browser to allow you to search a huge bunch of CD-based KB articles (using the Pre-2000 Qnnnn numbering system) about virtually the whole range of M$ products, such as Office 97, 98 and 2000, Windows 3.X, 95x, 98, CE, NT3 and NT4, Word for MAC, Word for DOS, Works for MAC, DOS or Windows, VB, Fortran, yada, yada, yada...
These are "How To" articles, mind, not bug fixes and security update notices. But an invaluable resource if you are actually planning on doing stuff with the software of that day (rather than just looking at it and reminiscing about all the knowledge you've forgotten).
Indeed, this CD bolts on rather nicely to the earlier content mentioned by raindog308, by taking up the "how-to" narrative pretty much where raindog's suggested CD ends. Incidentally, that particular CD ISO does not appear to work with modern tools such as WinRAR or PowerISO. I had to open it on my Windows NT 4 VM using an ancient copy of VirtualCloneDrive (v4.1.0.1 from the year 2002)!
Who says that old systems aren't useful?
The November 1999 TechNet CD also appears to cover much the same Qnnnn knowledge base documents as the https://archive.org/details/MicrosoftKnowledgeBaseArchive200000Articles download does, but with the benefit of that Microsoft-ready-made CD-browser, database and search tool already built in. The Archive does not have this tool, which makes it harder to use.
And that archive download has the added pain that you have to try and extract the quarter-million files in that "7z" file, which appears to choke 7zip to death on my system. I had to use my recent version of WinRAR, which tells me it is going to keep my NAS drive busy for about four hours to extract the 219,142 htm files, that's 1.06GB worth of HTML which is no use at all whilst it is still zipped up. This guy never heard of an ISO file?
I'm guessing that from that huge file count, this zip KB archive probably covers a bit more than the combination of the other two CDs, but it has no helpful installer. It also does not include any KB download executables either, so it may give you knowledge, but it won't deliver updates. That said - hard to believe, but - it did include some Qnnnn articles about Multiplan for DOS from 1988!
Once you've got all of this, you still haven't got any executables. But take a look here:
https://archive.org/details/WULOSTEW95W2k3
What's the specs of your system? It should work fine. Although they should have placed a tarball with the archive in the 7z file.
What happened to this? That site is not accessible.