"This is an index of the files from the mega warez collection"
https://archive.org/details/megawarez-vm-index
https://archive.org/details/ibm-wgam-wbiz-collection
"I unpacked everything more or less automatically, and unpacked all the zip's to get their contents.
From there the data is injested to an AltaVista desktop engine, that has an Apache server
to make it work 'all in one'
I spread the contents over 3 hard disks
qemu.exe -L pc-bios -cpu Pentium -m 256 ^
-hda os.vmdk -hdb index.vmdk -hdd warez.vmdk ^
-net nic,model=pcnet -net user ^
-redir tcp:8080::80
This will let you hit the site over:
http://localhost:8080
You need to login as Administrator, there is no password, Apache & Altavista will start up, once logged in.
The version of qemu I've included makes the CAD easier with just control+alt+d
There is no warez here, just text indexes"
https://archive.org/details/ibm-wgam-wbiz-collection
"I unpacked everything more or less automatically, and unpacked all the zip's to get their contents.
From there the data is injested to an AltaVista desktop engine, that has an Apache server
to make it work 'all in one'
I spread the contents over 3 hard disks
qemu.exe -L pc-bios -cpu Pentium -m 256 ^
-hda os.vmdk -hdb index.vmdk -hdd warez.vmdk ^
-net nic,model=pcnet -net user ^
-redir tcp:8080::80
This will let you hit the site over:
http://localhost:8080
You need to login as Administrator, there is no password, Apache & Altavista will start up, once logged in.
The version of qemu I've included makes the CAD easier with just control+alt+d
There is no warez here, just text indexes"
Comments
As many probably know by now, the link this util indexes is 522 Gigabytes. No, not a misprint. From the halcyon days of warez, it has many (until now) forgotten, rare, or overlooked treasures.
Thanks for getting this out there.
of course!
Some time ago, I collected all the directory listings of that collection for the ZIPs started with "WBIZ". Those are the really old ones. Found some good early stuff.
https://archive.org/details/wbiz-0001-0895-all.txt
On early wbiz archives (0001-0030) there are many broken files, like 20-30% or something
There is someone who just completed uploading over several days what appears to be a complete collection of Windows updates - a little over 82 gigabytes.
https://archive.org/details/windows6.1-kb976932-x64_202502
Truth is, there are ass hats posting 0-day warez on a daily basis that probably exceeds terabytes each year. This abuses IA, and their servers are appropriated for seeding warez. It's a mess.
Well - maybe yes, maybe no. We have to consider what "arc" tool(s) were available at the time those files were created.
In that case, one would have to find what was commonly available during that era, and create a real environment where the tool and archive can behave as was expected "back in the day".
For instance, I found a couple archives that used the earliest zip compression algorithm that Phil Katz' first PKZip/PKArc tools used - and that method was dropped by the time PKZip 2.0 was released (my memory may fail me about exact versions/dates). Certainly, it was around the 1989 time frame.
**EDIT**: We have to remember that Phil Katz early on was a OS/2 fan boi (many of us had high hopes - but- IBM so...), and it was for that platform his first tools were designed.