You can find any number of old and strange things that you never thought would be preserved in the Internet Archive. My current obsession is the collection of 5¼ floppy sleeves put together by archivist Jason Scott.

As a kid, I played "Zaxxon" and "Montezuma's Revenge" on my father's old IBM compatible PC. At the time, I didn't pay much attention to the hodgepodge of sleeves that kept each disc safe, but today, it's fun to look back at the typography, brand names, and instruction manuals of the 80s that were once commonplace.

There are 628 photos in this collection (hosted on Flickr for easy viewing), which is probably a small fraction of all floppy sleeves designed and printed in the 5¼ floppy era. Unlike the 3 ½-inch floppy disks that came later, these disks did not have a sliding metal shield to protect the magnetic storage inside. Therefore, the sleeve protected the exposed bits from fingerprints and scratches and kept the disk readable.

It was also an opportunity to be stylish. The discs themselves were mostly plain black plastic with stickers identifying the software. Scott's collection of sleeves used some of the most iconic fonts of the '80s, some brands long dead, others no longer big names in PC technology since the days of the 5¼ floppy.

In the gallery below, I've pulled out a few of my favorites, but I encourage you to spend five minutes on Flickr and look through the others. This is just a small sampling of the fun stuff you can find at the Internet Archive. For example, there is a collection of 7,000 MS-DOS games playable in your browser.