This USENET posting from 1991 is a blast from the past: mention of the huge and deeply useful University of Lancaster archive of public-domain software, one of the most important — at least, in UK academia — resources of tools and software, from the serious to the silly.

In the web/post-web age it’s hard to think of a modern equivalent to this pre-web resource, but somewhere between the Internet Archive, arXiv, PasteBin, GitHub and your preferred App Store? Something like that, anyway…

And: it’s bonkers to think of archives of free software being gatekept to an academic community is… well, nowadays you have to be Elsevier to do that sort of thing.

No, please don’t mail and ask us to be registered! I’m afraid we exist to serve only the UK Academic Community, and if your host system is not in the uk.ac name domain then you can’t use us. Users in uk.ac domain can use the archive without registration.

https://groups.google.com/g/comp.sys.acorn/c/xzV_-AwrjvE