Apple fans looking for a dose of Mac nostalgia can now relive the early days of the Macintosh’s black-and-white software from the comfort of the internet.

Jason Scott is an archivist and the enthusiasm for what he curates is the kind ascribed to 15th-century manuscripts or Jamestown colony artifacts – not software on obsolete floppy disks written for a 40-year-old computer system.

Scott is out to collect any original or copied software disks for the Apple II as if a language is in danger of dying with the people who speak it or possess some record of its existence.

Those of us over a certain age have a lingering hangover from the days before digital: actual photographs. If you’re lucky (and extremely well organized), yours are neatly displayed on the walls and in labelled albums. If you’re unlucky (or plain lazy, like me), they’re shoved in cardboard boxes and left in cupboards to rot. That’s not how it should be, is it?

I love the Internet Archive, it’s one of the best online projects there’s ever been.

I knew it archived a lot of stuff, but until this week I had no idea that the collection included scanned magazines of old. Jason Scott, of textfiles.com fame, now works for the Archive and wrote a blog post about some of the latest additions – dozens of tech magazines from the dawn of personal computing.

At first glance, you won’t see anything Mac-specific on the list. But you need to delve a little deeper. Remember, in those days Apple was just one of dozens of new arrivals, all of them jostling for position in a brand new consumer market.