Four more Big Green CD discs now on archive.org

[Rhetorica]

A couple of days ago, an archive.org user named kevin1024 uploaded the Big Green CD version 1.0 from 1992.

https://archive.org/details/nextstep-big-green-cd-1.0/

Previously we had the 3-disc BGCD 8 set and the library disc from BGCD 5, so getting a glimpse into version 1 (which I think was mastered in August, though the filesystem timestamps are very screwy) is pretty different. This was between the release of the NeXTdimension and that of the NeXTstations, so the material here is all 68k and almost all monochrome.



Have any of you seen a GUI Fortune app for NeXT before? I sure haven't! Many of these aren't even in app bundles, which is a classic sign of being from the pre-3.0 era.

The disc is mastered a bit strangely: every directory has an executable "SKYLEE" file that's just a listing of contents, and the file dates range from 1976 to 1981... I guess their clock battery was in bad shape?

[wmlive]

Checking the profile of this user named kevin1024 reveals that he also uploaded BG3 and BG4 together with the Big Green Library (BGL) v2.0:

archive.org/details/nextstep-big-green-cd-3.0-upgrade

archive.org/details/nextstep-big-green-cd-4.0

archive.org/details/nextstep-big-green-library-2.0

Good times for digital history research!

[Protocol 7]

The weird mastering is due to using Young Minds Inc.'s long filename implementation. That's the YM in those weird YMTRANS.TBL files you often found on discs of this era. The SKYLEE file is read by NS and translates the short file names to the long ones.

If I mount it here in Linux, the file and folder names are all truncated.