The DECUS Library (or archive) is freeware software collected over a number of years by the Digital Equipment Computer Users’ Society (DECUS) which was an independent computer user group related to Digital Equipment Corporation.

It consists of just over a gigabyte of software roughly divided chronologically. Originally the collection was distributed on tape media. Here is some WinDirStat captures:

… and at the moment this is about as accessible as it gets. Last year I wrote an experimental application in Java that used principles of the semantic web to parse the directory structure and files within the DECUS archive. One of the primary reasons for this was to provide a search facility for source code files. Standard MIME types (as can be seen in the Description field for the file types capture above) fall way off the mark for the content in the DECUS archive.

I identified the following file types. The plan for this retrochallenge is to rewrite this prototype application to provide a search facility for the archive.