Born-digital heritage is commonly associated with the emergence of the World Wide Web in the 1990s. Earlier digital cultures—shaped by floppy disks, home computers, and offline exchange—remain comparatively underexplored, particularly in East-Central Europe. This paper focuses on Polish floppy disk magazines (“diskmags”) from the 1980s and 1990s as a case study for rethinking early born-digital grassroots media.

Diskmags were multimedia, executable periodicals distributed on 5.25-inch floppy disks. Combining text, graphics, music, and code, they were closely tied to demoscene communities and to specific hardware platforms such as the Commodore C64 and Atari systems. Their material and technical dependencies pose significant challenges for preservation and analysis: meaningful access requires emulation environments, structured metadata, and interdisciplinary approaches integrating media archaeology, textual scholarship, and software preservation.

We present a newly curated subset of East-Central European diskmags within the international Diskmags Catalog. The dataset was created through semi-automated filtering, qualitative verification, emulation-based inspection, and linguistic classification. It is accessible via a web interface and as downloadable CSV files, enabling both exploratory browsing and computational analysis.

Methodologically, the project aims to combine metadata-driven quantitative analyses (publication timelines, network analysis of production groups) with qualitative close reading of emulated issues. We also assess the potential and limitations of large language models for language detection and thematic clustering in non-standard, multimedia-rich corpora.

By foregrounding Polish and East-Central European diskmags, the project contributes to diversifying digital heritage narratives and asks whether current digital humanities infrastructures are adequately prepared to engage with materially complex, pre-web digital culture.