20 Nov
2021
20 Nov
'21
10:46 a.m.
On Nov 20, 2021, at 7:56 AM, Bill Gunshannon via
cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
On 11/19/21 9:33 PM, Steve Malikoff via cctalk wrote:
The web can make things perpetual if they are stored redundantly and in a distributed
fashion. But anything centralized is just as vulnerable as any centralized copy ever was,
whether from risk of fire or flood, or abandonment. And in the case of digital data the
added complication is the loss of the necessary technology.
The Long Now Foundation has done some good thinking about this; some others have as well.
There's a long-lived software achival concept with "Rosetta" in its name
that might be worth more attention.
One of the best reasons why GIT is good is that everyone has a full record. With
Subversion of CVS, you just have the one revision you have currently checked out, but GIT
gives you (as the command indicates) a full clone of the entire repository. So suppose
that, say, GitHub suddenly goes belly up -- for any item in their collection that anyone
anywhere has cloned, nothing is lost. The same goes for any other project that uses GIT,
such as some of what the Free Software Foundation keeps.
I'd say more of us need to be more paranoid about mirroring stuff. Is there an
archive.org mirror? I don't know. There are bitsavers mirrors, which is a good thing
to know, but not all classic computer stuff is in bitsavers. What about Wikipedia?
There's Infogalactic, but that's a fork, not a mirror.
paul
Michael asked
And what happens when you wake up one morning to find archive.org is
gone, too?
I remember hearing how the web was going to make everything perpetual.
And yet the list of things that have disappeared just gets longer and
longer. What are we, as a community, to do to fix this
and make sure that our
history stays peserved and isn't one bad day away from vanishing.
Whenever
some new vintage computing page appears I go to archive.org and submit the
URL to them for the wayback machine. Often they've crawled it already, but not
always
so I think it does help.