Whether you are a programmer/software engineer or just a computer user,
often you find yourself in the position where you're looking for a piece of
source code, shareware product, or publicly available software package. Where
do you start to look? Start here:
The "original" data archive. They gots it all here, and they've been doing it since 1988 when we had
to FTP everything. Remember those days? The "wuarchive" is a browse-able index sorted by
platform and package. They mirror most of the "major" platform specific sites. They are extremely busy.
If you don't get connected, you can wait a while and try again later.
MIT has mirrored the "info-mac" archive and has added a html interface
that allows both browsing or searcing by keyword. For convenient browsing
this archive has been indexed by genre (as the original "info-mac" archive
has always been) as well as listings in reverse-chronological order to
find the most recently submitted files. Most files include an abstract so you
can read about files before you download.
Another service that has spawned from MIT, the FSF is dedicated to
providing good software tools and demanding free redistribution of these
tools. Some of their tools include GNU (which stands for "GNU's N
ot UNIX") emacs (a text editor/total work envoronment), GCC/G++
(a C/C++ mostly ANSI compliant compiler), LINUX (UNIX os for Intel machines),
Ghostscript (a PostScript preview tool), and more...
Shareware.com is a incredibly huge searchable index of the contents of dozens
of archives. It's the fastest way to find shareware or freeware, and it was
one of the sources for some of the software I used to get this latest version
of my home page up. (eg. the editor I used for the client-side image map).
Use the following form to search for something in shareware.com:
