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gmuslera
Used to have some of them in my BBS in Uruguay in the early 90s, before internet got there. They (and CDs included with magazines and things like that) drove the shareware/freeware movement around here back then.
pajko
SAC is also worth mentioning. It was my source of utilities back then, distributed on CDs included with a computer magazine (still did not have access to the net for a couple of more years). https://www.sac.sk/
GekkePrutser
Yeah I remember those CDs. Never had them, they were quite expensive in Europe IIRC.

Back in those days having 700MB of stuff was HUGE :P On packet radio it would take me all night to transfer a file of 1-2MB. In fact it was a lot quicker to grab my bicycle and take a floppy over to the friend I was downloading it from. Sneakernet was actually a thing :D

I'll have a look through these archives.

ido
Don't know what packet radio is, but during my dialup days I'd be happy to get 5kb/sec download (on supposedly 56kbit connection). I remember moving the computer to another room that had better quality phone line as that affected internet speed.
stevekemp
I remember hearing of them, but at the time I didn't have the ability to download files that large over my modem.

Recently I've been getting back into CP/M and it took only a few minutes to download a Walnut Creek CP/M CD image from 1994. Largely because of the slow hosting site.

So much fun exploring the random contents, will definitely take me a few months to try to run all the binaries, and experiment with them!

squarefoot
I had some of those CDs. In the early 90, before broadband Internet, they were a godsend. That site parent directory is worth a look too, lots of memories over there.
elvis70
Nostalgia. I still have a "Shareware Bonanza" compilation CD from Tons & Gigs from 1992 with 20,000+ programs on 3 CDs, about 1.5GB of compressed files (more than 3GB uncompressed after them), which was huge. I had a 32MB hard drive back then (before I bought a new PC with a 120MB hard drive the following year).

https://archive.org/details/Shareware_Bonanza_Tons_and_Gigs_...