i have a book and a 3-CD set called “Creative Alliance 9.0” which, allegedly, contains 7000+ truetype and type 1 fonts. according to ebay, it was made in 1999, when things were still labeled as “compatible with MacOS 6.0 or greater, and Windows 3.1, 95, 98, and NT”…

gawd, i remember those days… 🙄

and, as far as i can tell, the font information on these disks still work on modern computers — “font” (or, more technically accurately “typeface”) information doesn’t change that much.

i recently followed this guy on mastodon, who is the lead for a project called “DISKMASTER” at the internet archive, which is a collection of around 26,200 disks from the period of time when CD-ROMs were the medium of choice. when he heard about this disk set, he encouraged me to upload it to the archive…

but… 😒

first, i made an account, with my default browser, firefox — recently firefox changed their user agreement to allow them to be able to sell, or use to train their AI, any information that i upload (including this text 😒), so that is likely to change very soon — and when i tried to upload the first disk, i got this error message that said “Remove all zero byte files”, said that directories are “zero byte files” and upload of directories was only possible through chrome… but there is no “chrome” for linux, and the mac i have which has a CD-ROM drive runs an “antique” operating system and no longer connects to internet, so that my really important applications like photoshop and sibelius can’t “automatically” update themselves into oblivion.

however, there IS a “chromium” for linux, which i don’t use because i’m trying to keep google from sticking THEIR nose into my private life (as much as possible), so i tried that…

when i tried to hit the internet archive, it gave me a blank page, with no clue that i had even loaded a web page. when i looked at the source for the page, it appears that i was SUPPOSED to be re-directed to a “no script” version of the page, but the URI to which i was supposed to be re-directed, doesn’t exist. 😒🙄

now, don’t get me wrong, i would DEARLY LOVE to get these disks on the internet archive, and, potentially, gain access to these fonts… i USED TO HAVE most of them, because i USED TO BE in the business of using them on a regular basis, but since the cloud drive crack of 2021, they all went away, and these disks NO LONGER WORK on modern mac or windows computers, even if they do have CD-ROM drives.

but, unless someone can tell me how to upload them without any “zero byte files”, i’m lost.