If you ever find yourself yearning for the days machines like the Intellivision console and Spectrum ZX first bought computing to the masses, well, you’re in for a treat. This weekend, the Internet Archive announced the “Historical Software Collection,” a curated set of noteworthy games, productivity software, and more from the 1970s and 1980s. From the website, its possible to access dozens of historically significant software programs via an emulator through your web browser. This is believed to be the largest project of its kind on the web, and all of the software is entirely free to use.

The Historical Software Collection is designed to show you how things really were ‘back in the day’, and gives us the chance to relive classic, totally outdated and defunct software like WordStar, one of the most widely used word processing programs in the early 1980s, and VisiCalc, a 1979 spreadsheet program for the Apple II that helped to drag computing out of the personal hobby realm and into practical business applications. Then there’s a number of classic games, including the futuristic space trading adventure Elite, the 1982 Atari 2600 version of Pac-Man, and Pitfall! from the same year. The Internet Archive promises to continue adding to its collection over time.

VisiCalc was one of the first widely used business applications

All of this has been made possible thanks to a Javascript port of the MESS console emulator, called JMESS, which relies heavily on the Emscripten compiler project. The Historical Software Collection can be accessed through the most recent versions of Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari, and is said to be the result of more than 15 years of open source collaboration between fans of historical software, headed up by Mozilla’s Alon Zakai.

Pitfall! was the second-most popular Atari 2600 game after Pac-Man

The Internet Archives states that the collection is important for a number of reasons. Firstly, the software contained within it is noted for helping to revolutionize the computing industry. Second, the JMESS emulator gives us a way to interact with software that only exists on a few dusty old cassettes and floppy disks, and is only compatible with now-defunct computing systems. And if nothing else, the archive helps us to understand how early computing shaped the world, and how rapidly its evolved to bring us to where we are today.