I've discovered their efforts to archive old dos games... fully playable in the browser through a dosbox build in WASM as far as I know. That's a really impressive cooperation of very old and very new technology - 16 bit up to the edge of JS (- edit: or rather, the edge of browser based computing).
And on that train of thought, I just had a little flashback about storage sizes. There was some time when 3.14 MB was a big unit of measurement, and some 50MB drive was huge. The classical example: Monkey Island, Indiana Jones or Day of the Tentacle on ~12 floppy disks. But you had to choose which 1 or 2 to install because you didn't have enough space on your hard drive, or you had to swap disks every few screens :)
Or, they are archiving a lot of video playthroughs in the lets-play style from video sites, in case those sites go through a meltdown like viddler does.
I guess I'm rambling. Point is: This isn't just a storage dump. There are also interesting projects around the internet archive to make the old things accessible on new systems. Very worthwhile donating to.
I don't get why you are being downvoted. Are people not familiar with the expression "get out of here" used in a friendly manner? Or do they really downvote you because they think it is so bad that you think that 1kB should be equal to 1000 bytes? I mean, I don't agree with you either but IMO the downvote should only be used for things that are either factually wrong, or which detract strongly from the conversation, or which contribute nothing at all. I think your comment is nice and it does not deserve to be downvoted.
Yeah, apparently downvotes can be used as a "disagree" signal. Usually when I see a comment being unfairly downvoted that way, I upvote as a counter-balance, even if I disagree with the argument (i.e., how many bytes in 1kB).
2.88MB was supported by most drives and was usable under Linux. You were supposed to use proper 2.88MB floppy, but you could usually get away with using a 1.44MB floppy and reformatting.
I'm not entirely sure how well they were supported under Windows though.
IIRC the Windows 95 install floppies were 2.88MB. With that in mind it's probably safe to assume that they were at least readable even in DOS, although I don't recall being able to format or write to a floppy at that capacity in any version of DOS/Windows.
A few month back I authoritatively stated that floppies allowed for 3.14Mb, understanding my mistake only a few minutes later and being thoroughly ashamed. Now I now there's some reason behind it, not just a random glitch of memory.
There is an interesting podcast with a "Chuck" Somerville interview. He started on the Apple ][. Its pretty fun walk through the industry in the 80s, and touches on getting the "Chips Challenge" name back from the group that bought it.
Most of that effort to archive games is not IA. It is from 2 other groups who sometimes work with IA if they all are not fighting. Specifically one group is the one going through all of them and configuring them to work correctly in DOSBox. Another is just going through and just cataloging them. Getting the metadata on that stuff is kind of tough now. Like what was the exact date a game came out on? Does it have artwork still? Is there some odd protection scheme going on? Is there an IMG file for the disks? Or is it just some random pile of files? Can you get a copy from ebay? etc etc etc. IA typically notes who is doing the archive work. IA also respects takedown notices for these games. As many of them sort of came back from the dead and are sold again, or the company just does not want its IP on some random site. A good portion though no one really knows who owns them anymore. Some have clear lineage. Some have been sold over and over to random companies and depending on contracts no one knows.
That 'scene' is also full of drama and very insular. Donate to IA to help them build better infrastructure and better search. But donating because they host old abandoned DOS games I would not call a good reason, and misplaced. Because the people doing the majority of the work are doing it because they like it, not money. IA does have some work around that such as getting dosbox and mame running in a browser. Just be clear on what you are donating to.
And on that train of thought, I just had a little flashback about storage sizes. There was some time when 3.14 MB was a big unit of measurement, and some 50MB drive was huge. The classical example: Monkey Island, Indiana Jones or Day of the Tentacle on ~12 floppy disks. But you had to choose which 1 or 2 to install because you didn't have enough space on your hard drive, or you had to swap disks every few screens :)
Or, they are archiving a lot of video playthroughs in the lets-play style from video sites, in case those sites go through a meltdown like viddler does.
I guess I'm rambling. Point is: This isn't just a storage dump. There are also interesting projects around the internet archive to make the old things accessible on new systems. Very worthwhile donating to.