9 Aug
2012
9 Aug
'12
2:03 a.m.
On 9 August 2012 04:54, Chuck Guzis <cclist at sydex.com> wrote:
Makes me wonder what archaeologists a thousand years hence will think
of our landfills. I wonder if we're starting the "Great Dark Age"
where almost nothing will be known, because, you know, it's all on
the Web...
We're already there.
I feel that way sometimes when looking for old software and hardware
information. Sure, archive.org has a lot of stuff, but it doesn't
archive *everything*. Inevitably, it's that missing bit that I
really need.
While the likes of archive.org are indeed doing their best to preserve
websites, some things come and go without any form of preservation,
and of course, there was all the stuff going on /before/ WWW took off
-
e.g. My own interests are in the old British Telecom/GPO "Prestel"
viewdata service - developed in the 1970s, it ran publicly 1979-1995,
providing pretty much everything we use the 'net for today for the UK.
But it was a single supplier-run service rather than the distributed
systems we see now. It was sold off, then closed, and nobody seems to
have kept even a backup tape; at least a quarter of a million pages of
information and a couple of decades of work for countless people just
gone... and that's just one of many services. Lots of countries tried
setting up viewdata services, some with more success than others.
Minitel has only just closed this year - I wonder what they did to
preserve anything. And then there re the other big alternatives -
CompuServe, AOL, CIX, Prodigy, just to pull a few names out of the
hat. All systems people poured their lives into. All gone.
Rob
www.viewdata.org.uk