With the introduction of offline storage (in the form of tape and punch cards, later floppy disks, hard drives and cards), computer users began to create and acquire all manner of data to use with their machines. Programs, textfiles, and later images, sound and moving image data would be collected in the course of computer ownership and maintenance. Over time, this collection would sometimes resemble a pile, or a library, or an archive. The unifying theme would only be that they were all on the same storage medium.

This collection is meant to be a deep storage archive of these sets of files and data, fused together as originally acquired from efforts to preserve them. Sometimes the files ran together on a bulletin board system, while others are collections of images disks or cassettes that were in the possession of one person.

The ideal situation would be a legion of curated displays and presentation of this data to an audience, or as fully-described datasets for the purposes of research and historical knowledge. Over time, these collections may find new iterations as such museum pieces and study aids, but for now they are gathered groups of information, awaiting the computer history equivalent of "crate diggers" going through "the stacks" to find precious forgotten history.

Researchers will also want to visit TOSEC, the Old School Emulation Center collection, and the gathered collection of FTP Sites at the FTP Site Boneyeard.