Some time in 2020 I started collecting CD-ROMs from old Macintosh magazines. Whilst the discs are of Japanese origin—because the supply was plentiful during the extended spring clean of lockdown—they contain a great deal of software from all over the world and a lot of it is therefore in English. They’re an amazing source of old gold: sofware, images, demos, documentation, and many other files. As of today I have 460+ discs totalling almost 1 million files.
After the collection was well and truly established I decided to share the contents in a number of meaningful ways to help other preservationists and old Macintosh enthusiats. Firstly, I uploaded pretty much all of my discs to Internet Archive and I also managed to dump the directory listings from these old discs and created a search engine for lookups by file name, type, creator, date.
Anyway, in December 2024 I migrated my websites to an arm64-powered server and whilst doing so I updated a bunch of old pages. The MMM search engine was updated to provide a faster, better, more user-friendly experience on mobile. It now features quicker searching (thanks to multi-core ARM with more RAM for ripgrep), more legible results, and a tappable emoji tooltip to show which. If you run a query with multile thousands of results, the bottleneck will now be browser rendering time. So in that extreme case I would recommend using paged results.
I did experiment with a database version of the search but query time was much slower and server costs were much higher. I can’t beat the performance of ripgrep, that’s for sure!
Try the search here: www.gingerbeardman.com/mmm/
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