The actual list of content is incredibly disappointing. I wouldn't quite call this a non-event, but the material in this collection is less impressive than the announcement made me think at first.
What I see listed in the PDF generally falls into a few categories:
1. HR crap. Office plans, employee lists, various internal forms and memos. Of very little interest to anyone, unless there's something incredibly surprising hidden in there. (Probably not.)
2. Financial data. Interesting if you care about the finances of a software company from the 80s, incredibly boring otherwise.
3. Publicity documents. Product booklets, posters, newsletters, etc. These were given out all over the place, so it's not like these are things that have never been seen before.
4. A few folders of design papers. This is the potentially interesting part, but there's not a lot of them and they aren't described in any detail. Hopefully these are good.
5. Some very old disks which may or may not still be readable. This part just makes me kind of angry. These are almost certainly 5.25" disks, and as such they are nearing the end of their lifetime. If they haven't been stored well, they're likely already toast. Someone needs to get into this archive and copy these to more durable media NOW.
It's a non-event to you because you want design docs, not 'incredibly boring' financial data or 'HR crap'. The reality is that this type of archive isn't really meant for you, it's meant for historians and other researchers. The contents listed here are pretty standard for a corporate archive.
If someone wants to write a book about how 1980s game companies worked 50 years from now, then all that boring financial data and HR crap becomes much more relevant than the design documents (as interesting as they may be).
> Someone needs to get into this archive and copy these to more durable media NOW.
This is a problem archivist are having right now with data from even 10 years ago. 100 year old books and nitrite films just need a stable, cool, dry environment. Have you seen the hoops people jump through to get an old Apple floppy read? It's a race to copy the data to the current storage format before the last machine stops working.
That's why Piracy has actually some very positive effects in terms of keeping working copies ALIVE many years after the software/companies/machines are gone and dead. Look at the Amiga ADF archive (most of it is made of illegal copies), most of it would have been lost if no one did crack the games in the first place.
What I see listed in the PDF generally falls into a few categories:
1. HR crap. Office plans, employee lists, various internal forms and memos. Of very little interest to anyone, unless there's something incredibly surprising hidden in there. (Probably not.)
2. Financial data. Interesting if you care about the finances of a software company from the 80s, incredibly boring otherwise.
3. Publicity documents. Product booklets, posters, newsletters, etc. These were given out all over the place, so it's not like these are things that have never been seen before.
4. A few folders of design papers. This is the potentially interesting part, but there's not a lot of them and they aren't described in any detail. Hopefully these are good.
5. Some very old disks which may or may not still be readable. This part just makes me kind of angry. These are almost certainly 5.25" disks, and as such they are nearing the end of their lifetime. If they haven't been stored well, they're likely already toast. Someone needs to get into this archive and copy these to more durable media NOW.