RETROCOMPUTING Digital Spelunking By Tom Owad
Unearthing ancient Apple II files on AOL.
The ephemeral nature of the web
has appalling implications for the preservation of
information. Even many once-common Mac OS 9
shareware apps are now impossible to find, to say
nothing of older and more obscure programs. How
many web and FTP sites from 1994 still exist?
In the days when BBSes were more popular than
the internet, America Online’s file libraries rivaled
the entire internet in their breadth of files. It was
in an effort to determine whether these ancient
libraries still existed that I gingerly installed AOL on
a spare computer and signed up for an account.
My hope was that even though the original keywords for these libraries no longer worked, I might
still be able to find a link or URL that would take me
to the old file library search function, much in the
way that it’s still possible to access the Apple II forum
on AOL by going to keyword: aol://4344:1264.
a2main.10029531.514525857.
After much effort, I failed to find the search
page, but I was able to use the Apple II libraries to
understand the URL syntax. The URL for the Apple II
New Files library is aol://4400:8287, and here is the
URL for the UnForkIt file, contained in that library:
aol://4401:8287:636250. The first value identifies
the resource type; in this case, either 4400 for a
library, or 4401 for a file. The second number, 8287,
is the library ID, and 636250 is the file ID. The file
IDs are not consecutive within libraries.
By changing the library ID, it is possible to access
file libraries that no longer have direct links. I tried
random IDs and was soon bookmarking the Connectix
Macintosh Library and MacHacks.
As AOL has moved away from its proprietary
Rainman language in favor of HTML, and sophisticated users have left for the internet, these old
areas of AOL have been abandoned and forgotten.
Each file records the date it was most recently
downloaded. In many of these libraries, the most
recent download was from 1999. In a few, the
records have been confused with those for other
files — the description will be for a shareware utility,
but the file will be a JPEG. Other file downloads fail
halfway through. The system, it appears, has been
left to decay.
But the bulk of the files I found were in salvageable
condition. The challenge was to find the surviving
software libraries and download their contents. I
wrote a QuicKeys script to open the Keyword window,
type in a possible library address, and bookmark the
address if it worked. Over a period of several days,
this script tried about 70,000 possible library
locations. Another QuicKeys script is now visiting
each library and downloading the files. If you’d like
to learn more about the project, or lend a hand, visit
applefritter.com/aol.
Tom Owad (
owad@applefritter.com) is a Macintosh consultant in York, Pa., and the editor of
applefritter.com. He is the
author of Apple I Replica Creation (Syngress, 2005).
