The Internet Archive’s central mission is establishing “Universal Access to All Knowledge,” and we want to make sure that our library of millions of books, journals, audio files, and video recordings is available to anyone. Since lack of an internet connection is a major obstacle to that goal, we created the Offline Archive project—that works to make online collections available regardless of internet availability.

For many of our readers, the internet seems omnipresent—like electricity and running water, it’s available everywhere from our homes and offices to trains and planes. But for more than half of the world’s population, that access is far from guaranteed. In many developing countries and rural areas, the infrastructure that enables internet access is unreliable, slow, or nonexistent, while natural disasters and conflicts may exacerbate the problem. Additionally, internet access can be too expensive for many people, and some governments limit internet access or censor the content for political reasons. All of these factors can combine to make internet access inconsistent, low-quality, or altogether unavailable for billions of people, which in turn leads to poor educational outcomes and intergenerational poverty. Compounding the challenge, the internet in wealthier countries is growing rapidly, and high-bandwidth videos and graphics are making it harder than ever for people on low-quality networks to participate in the modern web.

As part of a solution to this problem, we have built an offline server that transfers Internet Archive collections to a local server, caches content while browsing, and delivers the Internet Archive UI offline in the browser. The system moves content between servers by “sneakernet”—on disks, USB sticks, and SD cards. This approach should improve access for anything from a Raspberry Pi to an institutional server holding terabytes of data. Right now, we’re working to make it available in a variety of different languages, so that anybody can utilize it—not just English speakers.

Best of all, the Offline Archive project is open source, so that people around the world can collaborate to make it better. We are currently integrating the Archive’s APIs with those of our partners, to make it easier for them to incorporate Internet Archive content. Together with our collaborators, we can bring the Internet Archive anywhere—ensuring that people everywhere can enjoy our digital library.

If you would like to lend a hand, there are lots of ways to collaborate:

• Software developers can help us add features, platforms, and internationalization
• Platform developers can talk to us about integrating the Internet Archive’s content or server
• Content owners and aggregators can help make more content available, especially educational content and material in other languages.
• Community networks and internet access practitioners can help by becoming early adopters

See archive.org/about/offline-archive for more information, or contact mitra@archive.org to collaborate or contribute to this project.

If you would like to see the Offline Archive in action and meet its builder, Mitra Ardron, then come to the Internet Archive World Night Market on October 23rd and look for the Offline Archive demo table!

This is a time of transition, musically speaking, at the Internet Archive..

Our online digital library is best known for its immense archive of web pages and websites in the Wayback Machines. Less well known are the million-plus recordings the site has stored digitally and made available to the general public, mostly from 78s, albums and CDs.

Highlighting the growing importance of music on archive.org is the debut this month of our new music player. While you can listen to only a sample of most modern songs, the new player now embeds Spotify and YouTube versions of the full song, so listeners are now able to click right from archive.org to those services and listen to the full track. Examples: https://archive.org/details/cd_ultimate-santana_santana-alex-band-of-the-calling-baby-bash and https://archive.org/details/cd_the-big-picture_big-l-2pac-a.g.-big-daddy-kane-fat-joe-gur

We’ve digitized at high resolution the album liner notes, including full CD booklets and the paper labels on the discs themselves. And at the bottom of each page are lists of related music tracks – covers, other versions of the same song done by the same artist and compilations where that song has been used.

“It’s exploratory; it’s not exact,” said Internet Archive’s Brenton Cheng, who is at the head of the product team engineering the new music player. “The system uses each song’s acoustic ‘thumbprint’ to match it with songs in other services. The goal here is to start engaging with the music.”

“With our related music tracks listed down below, you are going to be exploring and discovering items, covers and versions that you didn’t know existed before. I think now we’re doing a better job of presenting the content that we have, and then helping people discover more.”

As streaming services gain popularity, the rich fountain of information found on album covers and CD liner notes is in danger of being lost. The Internet Archive seeks to fill that void by preserving the entire package that makes for a deeper musical experience. Now exploring those covers is right there in the music player itself.

“I think our presentation experience has until now not been as much of a focus as our gathering of materials from different sources,” Cheng said. “So now we are really trying to take time and check with our users, finding out who’s using the site and what they need. And we’re trying to present better experiences for exploring, consuming and searching for content.”

Another few thousand DOS Games are playable at the Internet Archive! Since our initial announcement in 2015, we’ve added occasional new games here and there to the collection, but this will be our biggest update yet, ranging from tiny recent independent productions to long-forgotten big-name releases from decades ago.

To browse the latest collection, hit this link and look around.

The usual caveats apply: Sometimes the emulations are slower than they should be, especially on older machines. Not all games are enjoyable to play. And of course, we are linking manuals where we can but not every game has a manual.

If you’ve been enjoying our “emulation in the browser” system over the years, then this is more of that. If you’re new to it or want to hear more about all this, keep reading.

A Recognition of Hard Work, and A Breathtaking View

The update of these MS-DOS games comes from a project called eXoDOS, which has expanded over the years in the realm of collecting DOS games for easy playability on modern systems to tracking down and capturing, as best as can be done, the full context of DOS games – from the earliest simple games in the first couple years of the IBM PC to recently created independent productions that still work in the MS-DOS environment.

What makes the collection more than just a pile of old, now-playable games, is how it has to take head-on the problems of software preservation and history. Having an old executable and a scanned copy of the manual represents only the first few steps. DOS has remained consistent in some ways over the last (nearly) 40 years, but a lot has changed under the hood and programs were sometimes only written to work on very specific hardware and a very specific setup. They were released, sold some amount of copies, and then disappeared off the shelves, if not everyone’s memories.

It is all these extra steps, under the hood, of acquisition and configuration, that represents the hardest work by the eXoDOS project, and I recognize that long-time and Herculean effort. As a result, the eXoDOS project has over 7,000 titles they’ve made work dependably and consistently.

Separately from the eXoDOS project, I’ve been putting a percentage of these games into the Emularity system on the Internet Archive for research, entertainment and quick online access to the programs. The issues that are introduced by this are mine and mine alone, and eXoDOS is not able to help with them. You can always mail me at jscott@archive.org with questions or technical concerns.

This should be all that needs to be said, but since the Archive is doing things a little strangely, there’s a lot to keep in mind before you really dive in (or to realize, when you come back with questions).

That Hilarious Problem With CD-ROMs

Putting these games into the Internet Archive has, over time, brought into sharp focus particular issues with browser-based emulation. For example, keyboard collision, where the input needs of the emulator are taken over by the browser itself, and the problems of a program needing a lot more horsepower to run in a browser emulator than a user’s system can handle.

Some of these have solutions that aren’t always great (Buy faster hardware!) and in some cases the problem is currently terminal (these programs have been taken offline for a future date). But the most obvious and pressing is that games based off CD-ROMs take a significant, huge amount of time to load.

CD-ROMs were a boon to the early-to-late 1990s, allowing games to have audio and video like never before. Depending on the tricks used, you got full-motion video (FMV), the playing of CD audio tracks for background music, and levels and variation of content for the games far beyond what floppy disks could ever hope.

But it was also a very large amount of data (up to 700 megabytes per CD) and it’s one thing to have the data sitting on a plastic disc in a local machine, and yet another to have a network connection pull the entire contents of the CD-ROM into memory and hold it there as a virtual file resources. This is going to be an enormous lean on the vast majority of Internet users out there – downloading multi-hundred-megabyte files into memory and then keeping them there, and then losing it all when the browser window closes. Network speeds will improve over time, but this is probably the biggest show-stopper of them all for many folks.

If you find yourself loading up one of these games and facing down a hundred-megabyte download, consider one of the smaller games instead, unless it’s a title you really, really want to try out. Maybe in a few years we’ll look back at cable-modem speeds and laugh at the crawling, but for now, they’re pretty significant.

Some Jewels in the Mix

Luckily, there are some smaller-sized games in this new update that will load relatively quickly and are really enjoyable to look at and to play. Here’s some of my recommendations:

First, a game special to me: the IBM DOS version of Adventure, calling itself “Microsoft Adventure”. It’s actually a small rebranding of the original start of the text adventure world, “Colossal Cave” or ADVENT, by Don Woods and Will Crowther. Remixed to be sold by IBM and Microsoft, this is how I first got into these, and it boots up instantly, providing hours of fun if you’ve never tried it before.

Mr. Blobby, a 1994 DOS Platform game, has all the hallmarks of the genre – bonkers physics, bright and lovely graphics, and joyful music. Be sure to redefine the keys before you try to play it, because besides running and jumping, you can spin and take things. The game does not get less weird as you go along.

Super Munchers: The Challenge Continues is a 1991 remix of the original educational game that sent your “muncher” gathering up words representing a given topic or idea. The speed of the game, along with the learning aspect, make this one of the more zesty “edutainment” titles available from the time.

Street Rod is a wonderfully compact 1989 racing game where it’s the 1960s and you’re going to buy your first hot-rod, tune it up, and race it for money to buy better and better rides. It’s a mouse-driven interface and loaded with all sorts of tricks to make the game fit into a “mere” 600 kilobytes compressed. Initially simple and then well worth the effort!

Digger from 1983 is a Dig-Dug-Clone-but-Not that came out right as IBM PCs were starting to take off, and it’s a lovely little game, steering around a mining machine while avoiding enemies and picking up diamonds. The most unintuitive thing is you need to fire using the “F1” key, so hopefully your keyboard has one.

I’m also going to suggest Floppy Frenzy from Windmill Software because it’s so much closer to the beginning of the IBM PC’s reign and you can see the difference in what the authors were comfortable with – the graphics are simpler, the game movement a little more rough, and the theme is geekiness incarnate: You’re a floppy disk avoiding magnets to leave traps for them, so you can gather the magnets up before the time runs out. If you don’t make it, an angel comes down and brings you to Floppy Disk Heaven. Again, F1 is the unusual key to leave traps.

There’s many more and I suggest people browse around and try things out, really soak in that MS-DOS joy. (And feel free to leave comments with suggestions.)

Thanks so much for coming along on this emulation journey!

• Jason Scott, Internet Archive Software Curator

How do we mark an event in time? The Etruscans used the concept of saeculum, the period of time from the moment something happens until the time when everyone who experienced that event has died. For Japanese Americans who were rounded up on the West Coast, herded onto trains and buses and incarcerated in desolate camps for years, we are approaching that saeculum.

My mother, Mary Tsuchiya Hanamura, was just 14 when she was put behind barbed wire. Today, she is 91. “They are putting Felicity Huffman in jail for 14 days for her crime,” my mother said last week. “They imprisoned me for three-and-a-half years.”

I was startled by my mother’s off-hand remark. It’s incredibly rare these days to hear an honest reflection like this—so reticent is my mother to speak out and now almost all of her family and friends from that time are gone. So how do we preserve their stories, pass them on, weave them into the fabric of our collective consciousness?  

That is the work of the cutting-edge cultural heritage organization, Densho. 23 years ago, its founder Tom Ikeda, an ex-Microsoft executive, realized that putting the Japanese American story online was critical. He foresaw this day when for so many digital learners, if materials aren’t online, it’s as if they don’t exist. The Internet Archive has joined hands with Densho to make sure the Densho Visual History Collection— hundreds of hours of oral history videos—are now downloadable, backed up with multiple copies, transferred to new video formats over time, and maintained forever. And together we’ve made this video collection even more accessible to anyone who has an internet connection.

Recently, my son, Kenny Okagaki, sent me this text:

I was thrilled that Kenny was interested in John Okada’s searing 1957 account, No-No Boy, which is such a seminal book for anyone who wants to understand our community’s complex responses to the government that imprisoned us. We own this book, but Kenny lives in Los Angeles now, hours away. 

Where could my recent college graduate read this novel immediately online, for free?

This week at a community event at the Internet Archive, Tom Ikeda and I were happy to announce that you can now borrow No-No Boy here, at the Digital Library of Japanese American Incarceration on archive.org. Working with scholars from Densho, we’ve selected, purchased and digitized more than 500 important books about WWII experiences of Japanese Americans. “There are so many books that we’ve heard about, but you can’t find them in your local library,” Tom explained. “This collection is a treasure! Now anyone in the world can borrow these hard to find volumes.”

Now anyone with an Internet Archive account can borrow these books for free. Since we’ve digitized them, you can search across the collection for a name, an event, a reference. Anyone around the world with an internet connection can utilize these important resources. We’re thankful to the Department of Interior & National Park Service’s Japanese American Confinement Site’s program, for partially funding this work.

Our next step is to weave these 500 books into the place where people go first for online information: Wikipedia. Working with scholars and Wikipedia editors, we are turning the footnotes into clickable links that take you to the exact page of the reference. Along the way, we are correcting factual errors, providing context, and making sure that at the end of this saeculum, the voices of those who lived through the incarceration will still be a source of truth.

We are living in an era when people wonder if truth really matters, if disinformation will drown out reality. That’s why I’m proud to be part of a team that is dedicating itself to the facts. We want every teacher, scholar, journalist, editor, and reader to know: the Japanese American incarceration really happened. And it must never happen to another community again.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Wendy Hanamura is the Internet Archive’s Director of Partnerships. She has been a foreign television correspondent based in Tokyo, a nightly reporter for CBS, and produced the documentary, “Honor Bound: A Personal Journey—the story of the 100th and 442nd Regimental Combat Team.”