PCjs Machines

Home of the original IBM PC emulator for browsers.

Logo

PC-SIG Diskette Library: The (Almost) Complete Collection

The PC Software Interest Group, aka PC-SIG, began distributing public domain software and shareware on 5.25-inch diskettes in the early 1980s, and over the next 10 years or so, the PC-SIG Library grew to thousands of diskettes.

To search the collection, try the new Search feature below.

[PCjs Machine "pcsig"]

Waiting for machine "pcsig" to load....

Search the PC-SIG Collection

You can search this entire PC-SIG collection for a filename or a keyword, using the very simplistic search function provided below. Our PC-SIG “database” doesn’t include descriptions of all the diskettes yet, so results will be incomplete. Stay tuned.

Notes Regarding This Collection

You can browse the collection by diskette:

Disks 1-2485 were initially populated from the PC-SIG Library 9th Edition CD-ROM (December 1990). Note that while the face of the CD-ROM says “April 1990”, the contents are actually circa December 1990.

Some of the diskettes had issues:

Also, the following diskettes were apparently “double-zipped”:

The following diskettes were then “back-filled” from the 8th Edition CD-ROM (April 1990), spanning diskettes 1-2121, since they had been removed from the 9th Edition:

Why didn’t we simply start with the 8th Edition CD-ROM (April 1990) and then fill in additions from subsequent editions? Because the 8th Edition did not preserve the diskettes as well as later editions; the 9th and later editions used ZIP files to preserve diskettes, whereas the 8th Edition only did so in a few cases (eg, if filenames used characters that weren’t allowed on CD-ROM); those cases are highlighted above.

Disks 2486-2804 were populated from the 10th Edition CD-ROM (September 1991).

Disks 2805-3404 were populated from the 12th Edition CD-ROM (March 1993), which was missing the following diskettes:

Disks 3405-4313 were populated from the 13th Edition CD-ROM (March 1994) – the last known CD-ROM edition. It was missing the following diskettes:

Last but not least, a small number of original PC-SIG diskettes have been located, so those have replaced the CD-ROM versions, since that’s how the library was originally distributed. Those diskettes include:

Unfortunately, an “original” PC-SIG diskette comes with a big caveat, because PC-SIG routinely updated the contents of its diskettes as software authors released updates. For example, the first versions of DISK0287 and DISK0288 would have been created in the mid-1980s, but the diskettes in our collection were updated in 1991 with a newer version of “File Express”.

So another challenge in creating a truly complete PC-SIG diskette collection would be collecting every version (or at least every first version) of every diskette that PC-SIG ever released – a challenge that seems impossible at this point.

A potentially achievable intermediate step would be locating copies of all diskettes that were later removed from the collection. Here is a list of all diskettes explicitly marked as “withdrawn”:

However, this list is incomplete, because it doesn’t include any diskettes implicitly withdrawn by simply being “erased” from the collection (eg, any diskettes noted above as missing from the 12th and 13th Edition CD-ROMs).

Locating an original PC-SIG CD-ROM from 1986 or 1987, like the one shown below in “The PC-SIG Library 4th Edition (March 1987)”, would be a great first step toward getting more “original” diskette contents.

PC-SIG Library 4th Edition, Page 424

[GitHub Source]