1991 Buick Park Avenue & Roadmaster Wagon IBM PC demo disks

[bscross32]

i wouldn't have overwritten something like that i mean come on.

[vwestlife]

@bscross32 Then feel free to travel back in time 20 years and tell my dad not to!

[Ryoga2K]

@bscross32 To be honest people wasn't about preserving at that time, it was the nineties, people wanted progress and thought that anything would be old by tomorrow, they never thought these things would actually being appreciated in the future, I think that nowadays we have more of a preservation culture than back in the day.

[hakemon]

Hmm, the Roadmaster. Essentially the Buick version of the Caprice I drive.

[bluenazz]

I think that the Buick Roadmaster was the last rear wheel drive Buick in production. I recall my Dad agonizing over whether he should buy one but he went with the LeSabre instead.

[rmx77]

i actually have a reel to reel tape that has tv and radio advertising music on it used by buick and on the case it has what all the song titles are and the length of each piece of music. also it has writen on it when it was to be used until. i should transfer that sometime.

[daewooparts]

i got a few of those GM disk somewhere laying around , i used to take all that stuff when i did work GM korea and the states,still got late 80's and 90's brochures by the box full

[uxwbill]

@daewooparts Any chance you'd be willing to maybe dig up a few different ones and let them be preserved?

[daewooparts]

@uxwbill all my car mags and brochures are sealed up and preserved ,i got boxes full of them including disk

[Ryoga2K]

@daewooparts hope you can copy some of the stuff and upload it that would be awesome although yeah.. I guess you will need some old school stuff (5¼ disks drives and a computer capable of connecting them) xD but it would be awesome nonetheless and much appreciated

[RetroGamerVX]

Wow, that stuff was ahead, don't remember anything like that over here :o(

[uxwbill]

Those were way cool. Too bad they were overwritten, though I might well have done the same back then. I plan to dig deeper and might even search some Usenet archives...or ask over there.

Also: Web pages that suck?

[vwestlife]

@uxwbill "Web Pages That Suck: Learn Good Design by Looking at Bad Design" by Vincent Flanders & Michael Willis, 1998. It comes with a CD-ROM entitled "Software That Doesn't Suck".

[mikeluscher159]

@vwestlife LOL @ 0:48 , feel free to copy and share with your friends, what happened to "dont copy that floppy"???

[vwestlife]

@mikeluscher159 The idea was to sell cars, not the software, so people copying the disk was free advertising for Buick.

[mikeluscher159]

@vwestlife good point.....

[artifactingreality]

so what was on the disks? just specs for the cars? Surely a printed brochure would have been a much better way to sell cars back then?

[vwestlife]

@artifactingreality This was before web sites existed, but yet most people had a computer in their home, so these programs were a new way of providing photos, specs, and prices of the cars to prospective buyers.

[artifactingreality]

@vwestlife neat. how good were the photos on those 320k discs?

[vwestlife]

@artifactingreality I was only a little kid when this program was new, so I don't remember exactly what the graphics looked like, but considering the limited resolution and disk space, the "photos" were probably more like line drawings, similar to those seen in the Mac version which uxwbill showed, except with some color added. The VGA version may have made some attempt to display very small 256-color photographs, but I don't know, since we didn't have a VGA-capable PC at home back in 1991.

[artifactingreality]

@vwestlife I wondered if anyone else was distributing their sales material on floppies back then. I guess you got lots of interesting shareware programs too.

[talldude123]

Interesting. Nowadays, people resarch cars on the web. I wonder if car dealers give out CD's or DVD's releated to models?

[uxwbill]

@talldude123 GM did, at least sometime into the 2000s. When I was younger (and some might say bolder), I went into dealerships and swiped a few of the sales literature booklets. The one for a Chevy Tahoe had a CD in it with programs for Windows and Macintosh.

[talldude123]

@uxwbill Well I do have a Consumer Reports Cars 1997 CD-ROM. And if I can figure out a way to share it (it's one of those programs where you need the CD to run it), I would! Cars from 1988 to 1997 on there, with specs, videos, safety stuff, etc.

[Knaeckebrotsaege]

@talldude123 "it's one of those programs where you need the CD to run it"

as in needs the CD to play stuff from it or as in copy protection crap?

might be worth a try to make an .iso image of the CD (any CD burning program should be able to do that) and upload it somewhere.

depending on the size, i'd recommend megaupload. they support up to 1GB per file. should be more than enough for this.