19 Nov
2021
19 Nov
'21
6:21 p.m.
The recent discussion of the sudden disappearance of DtCyber and the
various classic CDC software to run on it from the Internet has got me
thinking about just how precarious so much of computer history is in. So
much of what's out there online (and in person) today is at risk just
vanishing if whoever maintains the archive either loses interest (lots of
projects over the years succumb to this) , or rage quits (see the
expungement of DtCyber and Controlfreaks from the internet), or ends up
dying without having made proper arrangements (See the sad fate of the
Living Computer Museum, which was killed by its new owners as soon as COVID
gave them an excuse to do so)
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.
Mike
19 Nov
19 Nov
6:30 p.m.
New owners of LCM? I thought Vulcan was the owner all along?
Ian
Sent from my iPhone
On Nov 19, 2021, at 6:21 PM, Michael Kerpan via cctalk
<cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
?or ends up
dying without having made proper arrangements (See the sad fate of the
Living Computer Museum, which was killed by its new owners as soon as COVID
gave them an excuse to do so)
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.
Mike
20 Nov
20 Nov
4:26 a.m.
On Sat, 20 Nov 2021 at 03:30, Ian McLaughlin via cctalk
<cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
New owners of LCM? I thought Vulcan was the owner all along?
His younger sister Jody used to be the deputy at Vulcan:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jody_Allen
She left in 2014:
https://www.geekwire.com/2014/jody-allen-leaving-vulcan/
It was meant to be a sabbatical:
https://www.bizjournals.com/seattle/blog/techflash/2014/10/vulcan-ceo-jody-…
But when poor old Paul Allen died in 2018, Jody took control of Vulcan
and his >$20Bn fortune.
She started firing people in 2019:
https://www.geekwire.com/2019/paul-allens-vulcan-holding-company-cutting-jo…
And they sold off his yacht:
https://www.sportscasting.com/you-can-buy-seattle-sports-mogul-paul-allens-…
The sports team was left to run itself:
https://thespun.com/nfl/nfc-west/seattle-seahawks/report-pete-carroll-seatt…
But of course COVID-19 changed everything:
https://www.seahawks.com/news/vulcan-inc-and-the-paul-g-allen-family-founda…
Vulcan Productions shut down:
https://www.vulcanproductions.com/who-we-are
Then this year, (largely) post-COVID, the Allen Institute for
Artificial Intelligence (AI2) took over:
https://www.geekwire.com/2021/allen-institute-ai-takes-vulcans-portfolio-en…
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/allen-institute-ai-takes-over-190008690.html
--
Liam Proven ~ Profile: https://about.me/liamproven
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ~ gMail/gTalk/FB: lproven at gmail.com
Twitter/LinkedIn: lproven ~ Skype: liamproven
UK: (+44) 7939-087884 ~ Czech [+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal]: (+420) 702-829-053
19 Nov
19 Nov
6:33 p.m.
Michael asked
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.
Steve.
10:03 p.m.
iror everything guys make copies and stash
On Fri, Nov 19, 2021 at 8:34 PM Steve Malikoff via cctalk <
cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
Michael asked
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.
Steve.
20 Nov
20 Nov
2:22 a.m.
On Fri, Nov 19, 2021 at 8:34 PM Steve Malikoff via cctalk
> Michael asked
>> 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.
One of the DtCyber pages was archived, but when you drill down to the
sources, those pages are not there.
So you have to watch out for missing bits when you archive a website.
Antonio
--
Antonio Carlini
antonio at acarlini.com
19 Nov
19 Nov
10:23 p.m.
On 11/19/21 6:33 PM, Steve Malikoff via cctalk wrote:
Michael asked
To me, it's mind-boggling thinking of the stuff that has been lost--even
a lot of my own work while under employment. Unless tapes mysteriously
turn up, it's all gone.
Much of human history, it seems, has been written in drifting sand. But
it's always been thus.
--Chuck
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. 
20 Nov
20 Nov
4:56 a.m.
On 11/19/21 9:33 PM, Steve Malikoff via cctalk wrote:
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.
bill
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.
7:47 a.m.
I could go on and on about this myself but consider this one...
200 years from now, if you wanted to view family photos from the past
your ancestors would have to have passed them down electronically from
system to system, file format converted for all of that time. It's like
each generation will have to have a "family archivist" role. Maybe paper
photos will survive longer, but it will be clear that there are few paper
photos after 2000 or so, when electronic photos became the norm.
Archive.org, bitsavers.org, etc will all have to be converted too. I say
take it upon yourself to preserve whatever it is you deem worthy and make a
plan and prepare for how it will be maintained after you're gone. Family,
computer, documents, whatever. Don't rely on someone else to do it for
you.
All of the riches in the world did not prevent (and may have actually
caused) the dilemma the LCM is in now. I am sure a lot of it will be saved
and probably most will be preserved but not all. And that's basically how
it is, history fades away, even the big things. It takes a lot of
foresight and teaching the young folks about the importance of learning
from the past.
I don't know about you, but there aren't too many others in my family who
care about computer history...I wonder if any of what I have preserved will
be around even 100 years from now.
Bill
On Sat, 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:
Michael asked
and submit
the
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 URL to them for the wayback machine. Often
they've crawled it already,
but not always
so I think it does help.
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.
bill
8:37 a.m.
Archive.org, bitsavers.org, etc will all have to be
converted too. I say
take it upon yourself to preserve whatever it is you deem worthy and make a
plan and prepare for how it will be maintained after you're gone. Family,
computer, documents, whatever. Don't rely on someone else to do it for
you.
This was an interesting topic when I was at Science magazine: How to
preserve the archives. Everyone wants to get your paper archives, rip
them up, "scan them" and store them. However our first vendor who had
only the digital stuff we made in the 1980's onward went and had a "hard
disk failure" in their RAID drive that wasn't detected for years. Turns
out all the thumbnails were all that was left; fortunately we still had
the backup tapes but those easily could have been tossed.
Now I'm sure the "Google project" archived all the paper stuff but
Google will eventually go away just like Jeeves, MySpace, Yahoo Groups,
and so forth. Or they may forget and "lose" them in which case the data
is gone forever.
But what do you store it on? Big optical laserdiscs (80's)? Those had
bit rot after 20 years or so. Magtape? Sure, find the 7 track tapes from
Apollo and find a 7 track tape reader. Taravan/QIC02/Exabyte
Monster/Contemporary Cybernetics 8505? Good luck finding a working unit
and if you took advantage of hardware compression you'd better have the
module....
Best way to store? Paper. I recommended putting everything on baked
tablets and burying it in the center of a desert, they didn't go that
way but it's a valuable option. Well, until someone digs it up, puts it
in the "National Museum" and ISIS/Taliban/the usual book burning
bastards burns the place down....
C
8:40 a.m.
On 11/20/2021 10:47 AM, Bill Degnan via cctalk wrote:
All of the riches in the world did not prevent (and
may have actually
caused) the dilemma the LCM is in now. I am sure a lot of it will be saved
and probably most will be preserved but not all. And that's basically how
it is, history fades away, even the big things. It takes a lot of
foresight and teaching the young folks about the importance of learning
from the past.
One of these days I really need to write down the whole history of
AI.AI.MIT.EDU, MC, LSD, and how I had to rescue it not once, twice, but
three times from loading docks where it would have been put in the
trash. Each time I had to show up with a U-Hack to rescue it and find
another home where it would be "saved forever"....
That's why I wonder about it at LCM: I would so not be surprised if I
got a call from a trash company saying "Hey, we found this note in a
large pile of metal crap, can you be here in 12 hours so we don't have
to drag this thing to the dump? We're lazy and would appreciate the
beers more"
But what happens when I am dead? I can't be the guardian of that thing
forever....
CZ
8:55 a.m.
That's why I am saying you literally need a family archivist who
periodically converts content on old media to new media for.old family
photos. That is the only practical way to preserve things or than if the
original paper/photo/tape exists and is still readable. Extending to
vintage computing, there will always have to be a community of archivists.
B
On Sat, Nov 20, 2021, 11:40 AM Chris Zach via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
wrote:
On 11/20/2021 10:47 AM, Bill Degnan via cctalk wrote:
All of the riches in the world did not prevent
(and may have actually
caused) the dilemma the LCM is in now. I am sure a lot of it will be
saved
and probably most will be preserved but not all.
And that's basically
how
it is, history fades away, even the big things.
It takes a lot of
foresight and teaching the young folks about the importance of learning
from the past.
One of these days I really need to write down the whole history of
AI.AI.MIT.EDU, MC, LSD, and how I had to rescue it not once, twice, but
three times from loading docks where it would have been put in the
trash. Each time I had to show up with a U-Hack to rescue it and find
another home where it would be "saved forever"....
That's why I wonder about it at LCM: I would so not be surprised if I
got a call from a trash company saying "Hey, we found this note in a
large pile of metal crap, can you be here in 12 hours so we don't have
to drag this thing to the dump? We're lazy and would appreciate the
beers more"
But what happens when I am dead? I can't be the guardian of that thing
forever....
CZ
10:38 a.m.
How about all members here buy some big disks and take part in a number of curated
torrents? Publicize torrent health so it?s highly visible. Organize custodians
(preferably using folks who are already doing an excellent job). Cost of access to the
archives is that the prospective user can evidence that he?s helping sustain the
collection. Sure there are holes in this plan. But it?d be a good actionable start while
we?re on the topic and it can be adjusted.
On Nov 20, 2021, at 11:55, Bill Degnan via cctalk
<cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
?That's why I am saying you literally need a family archivist who
periodically converts content on old media to new media for.old family
photos. That is the only practical way to preserve things or than if the
original paper/photo/tape exists and is still readable. Extending to
vintage computing, there will always have to be a community of archivists.
B
> On Sat, Nov 20, 2021, 11:40 AM Chris Zach via cctalk <cctalk at
classiccmp.org>
> wrote:
>
>> On 11/20/2021 10:47 AM, Bill Degnan via cctalk wrote:
>> All of the riches in the world did not prevent (and may have actually
>> caused) the dilemma the LCM is in now. I am sure a lot of it will be
> saved
>> and probably most will be preserved but not all. And that's basically
> how
>> it is, history fades away, even the big things. It takes a lot of
>> foresight and teaching the young folks about the importance of learning
>> from the past.
>
> One of these days I really need to write down the whole history of
> AI.AI.MIT.EDU, MC, LSD, and how I had to rescue it not once, twice, but
> three times from loading docks where it would have been put in the
> trash. Each time I had to show up with a U-Hack to rescue it and find
> another home where it would be "saved forever"....
>
> That's why I wonder about it at LCM: I would so not be surprised if I
> got a call from a trash company saying "Hey, we found this note in a
> large pile of metal crap, can you be here in 12 hours so we don't have
> to drag this thing to the dump? We're lazy and would appreciate the
> beers more"
>
> But what happens when I am dead? I can't be the guardian of that thing
> forever....
>
> CZ
>
26 Nov
26 Nov
12:19 a.m.
On 11/20/21 5:55 PM, Bill Degnan via cctalk wrote:
That's why I am saying you literally need a family
archivist who
periodically converts content on old media to new media for.old family
photos. That is the only practical way to preserve things or than if the
original paper/photo/tape exists and is still readable. Extending to
vintage computing, there will always have to be a community of archivists.
You need one family archivist _every second generation_, at least, if
you want to cover more that 50 or so year of family history/pictures.
6:20 a.m.
On Fri, Nov 26, 2021 at 3:19 AM Christian Groessler via cctalk <
cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
On 11/20/21 5:55 PM, Bill Degnan via cctalk wrote:
To be clear to my original point, I believe there needs to be a family
archivist to knows how to manage and transfer whatever it is that they
store images of family events in every generation. Someone who passes the
ball at each generation to the next. Who knows, it might become popular
to print photos again after the great solar event of 2045 (for example)
Bill
That's why I am saying you literally need a
family archivist who
periodically converts content on old media to new media for.old family
photos. That is the only practical way to preserve things or than if the
original paper/photo/tape exists and is still readable. Extending to
vintage computing, there will always have to be a community of
archivists.
You need one family archivist _every second generation_, at least, if
you want to cover more that 50 or so year of family history/pictures.
6:36 a.m.
I've been passively following this topic for some time now and haven't
had anything to contribute, but now I do!
Between this list and others, such as NetBSD, I have recently been able
to bring up NetBSD on my ancient MicroVAX-II, which I originally bought
as a used system back in 1992.
My only means of getting anything into it was the ethernet adapter, and
I found that the MOP loader in linux did not support the ELF files used
by DEC.
Not only did I get expert advice from people with first-hand knowledge,
but an author of mopd replied and fixed the problem!
So now I wonder, in addition to documentation being lost, what are
people in the future going to do if they choose or are employed to
maintain such equipment in museums?? Are there even going to be any
museums?? Where will they get the advice such as been given to me?
Over the centuries, governments have seen fit to preserve history in the
arts and humanities with public funding and benefactors have given money
to have their name obn the door, but what about computers
Since computers now run pretty much everything in the world, shouldn't
we be lobbying governments to provide funding for computer museums and
employ qualified curators?
Just my .01 worth!
cheers,
Nigel
Nigel Johnson, MSc., MIEEE, MCSE VE3ID/G4AJQ/VA3MCU
Amateur Radio, the origin of the open-source concept!
Skype: TILBURY2591 nw.johnson at ieee.org
On 2021-11-26 9:20 a.m., Bill Degnan via cctalk wrote:
On Fri, Nov 26, 2021 at 3:19 AM Christian Groessler
via cctalk <
cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
On 11/20/21 5:55 PM, Bill Degnan via cctalk
wrote:
To be clear to my original point, I believe there needs to be a family
archivist to knows how to manage and transfer whatever it is that they
store images of family events in every generation. Someone who passes the
ball at each generation to the next. Who knows, it might become popular
to print photos again after the great solar event of 2045 (for example)
Bill That's why I am saying you literally need a
family archivist who
periodically converts content on old media to new media for.old family
photos. That is the only practical way to preserve things or than if the
original paper/photo/tape exists and is still readable. Extending to
vintage computing, there will always have to be a community of
archivists.
You need one family archivist _every second generation_, at least, if
you want to cover more that 50 or so year of family history/pictures.
20 Nov
20 Nov
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. 
10:59 a.m.
On Sat, Nov 20, 2021, 11:46 AM Paul Koning via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org 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.
You can mirror both svn and CVS. Lots of projects that used them did that
so there are thousands of copies of FreeBSD's svn and CVS trees about.
Further, git let's you do a shallow clone, which tosses history.
What git does is allow for local changes and the default is to mirror the
whole thing.
Having recovered from a disk failure that took out a svn repo in the time
it took to copy the files back is nice, but it did take more planning. Git
has a lot of cool features (it's why FreeBSD moved to it), but you are
misstating the defaults are always on and that others can't do this.
What has helped a lot since source history was lost in the 80s and 90s is
the adaptation of SCM, more disciplined use of it and the expansion of
disks to reduce pressure to purge old stuff and the expectations that SCM
is available to all... the early cowboy days of Linux, FSF and others has
been replaced by better engineering practices. Things still can be lost,
but it's much harder now... until things are really old...
I'd say more of us need to be more paranoid about mirroring stuff. Is
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:
> Michael asked
>> 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.
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. 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.
Yea, I struggle with what to do with my rainbow material for the long haul.
Warner
11:06 a.m.
On 20/11/2021 18:46, Paul Koning via cctalk wrote:
Is there an archive.org mirror?
How many of us could afford the disk space? 30PB in 2016 apparently. I
know that 10 years from now we'll all have PB drives, but right now it
would be hard. That's 8 years of downloading @ 1Gbps. So I suspect that
none of us has an archive.org mirror.
What about Wikipedia? There's Infogalactic, but
that's a fork, not a
mirror.
You can download a copy of Wikipedia and set up a local copy - it's
probably bigger now but when I tried it, it was about 3GB.
Antonio
--
Antonio Carlini
antonio at acarlini.com
11:15 a.m.
On Nov 20, 2021, at 2:06 PM, Antonio Carlini via
cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
On 20/11/2021 18:46, Paul Koning via cctalk wrote:
Is that all? What about the graphics? And all the languages? Infogalactic is a fork
only of the English Wikipedia, which is admittedly the biggest one but certainly
insufficient by itself. I've encountered a number of articles that are far better
covered in, say, the German edition than in the English one. Sumerian is an example.
As for Werner's comment about SVN mirroring, I was unclear. Yes, I know you can
mirror Subversion, or more precisely, the repository admin can set up remote backups for
it. The nice thing about web based archives is that you can mirror them on your own
initiative, at least moderately well. Quite well if they are structurally simple, like
bitsavers.
I have a few open source projects for which I keep the material on my own Subversion
server. One is mirrored; the others aren't. I'd be happy to let someone mirror
them if desired. And I've wondered if I should move them to Github to make them more
visible and automatically mirrored.
paul
Is there an archive.org mirror?
How many of us could afford the disk space? 30PB in 2016 apparently. I know that 10 years
from now we'll all have PB drives, but right now it would be hard. That's 8 years
of downloading @ 1Gbps. So I suspect that none of us has an archive.org mirror.
What about Wikipedia? There's Infogalactic,
but that's a fork, not a mirror.
You can download a copy of Wikipedia and set up a local copy - it's probably bigger
now but when I tried it, it was about 3GB.
12:27 p.m.
On 11/20/21 11:06 AM, Antonio Carlini via cctalk wrote:
On 20/11/2021 18:46, Paul Koning via cctalk wrote:
I had an interesting dream last night. I was in the CDC SVLOPS tape
room and I wondered if all those 7-track tapes would fit on a 128GB USB
pen drive.
I suspect that they would, with room to spare. Probably fit the
collection from ARHOPS on the drive as well. All of those programmers,
churning away and the sum total winds up on something that you could fit
several of in a shirt pocket.
How do we value data? All of those programmers spending much of their
lives developing a paltry (by today's standards) versus a script kiddie
churning out a web pages in day that take 100 MB to store.
More to the point: What is the value of what's being archived? Is a 4
MB web splash image worth as much as 4 MB of source code? If not, who
gets to decide on what to keep?
--Chuck
Is there an archive.org mirror?
How many of us could afford the disk space? 30PB in 2016 apparently. I
know that 10 years from now we'll all have PB drives, but right now it
would be hard. That's 8 years of downloading @ 1Gbps. So I suspect that
none of us has an archive.org mirror. 
11:31 a.m.
On 2021-11-20 5:56 a.m., Bill Gunshannon via cctalk wrote:
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.
Perpetual updates of software and money it seems.
bill
Keep your old computers around, as more and more programs fail
to work with the latest forced updates with microsoft and intel.
I have a new computer and my TL866 II plus programmer stopped working.
Works fine on my older machine. The same goes for older versions
of FPGA software.
Ben.
22 Nov
22 Nov
7:34 a.m.
On Sat, 20 Nov 2021 at 03:34, Steve Malikoff via cctalk
<cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
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.
When you submit a URL to archive org it only archives just that page,
it doesn't crawl it. So unless archive.org actually crawls that site
by itself you'll have to manually enter every single local link on
that page (and the links on the those pages again) in order to archive
it. I've submitted many URLs over the years, and when I re-visit the
for the most part haven't actually been crawled by archive.org at a
later point either. So those sites I care about (and some have now
disappeared from the net) I archive every link manually. I wish there
was a way to at least hint to archive.org that it would be nice to
have it crawled.
19 Nov
19 Nov
11:03 p.m.
Michael Kerpan wrote:
(See the sad fate of the Living Computer Museum, which
was killed by
its new owners as soon as COVID gave them an excuse to do so)
It's not killed. It's still there, but not open to the public. They
continue to offer remote access to vintage systems. Some are now
running on emuators.
20 Nov
20 Nov
11:42 a.m.
On Nov 19, 2021, at 11:03 PM, Lars Brinkhoff via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
wrote:
Michael Kerpan wrote:
As best I can tell, some systems are online if you have an account. I?ve tried to get one
a couple times in the last 6?8 months, to no avail.
Zane
(See the sad fate of the Living Computer Museum,
which was killed by
its new owners as soon as COVID gave them an excuse to do so)
It's not killed. It's still there, but not open to the public. They
continue to offer remote access to vintage systems. Some are now
running on emuators. 
12:12 p.m.
I agree there should be a way to archive and distribute classic software for
as long as enough people care about it.
The problem is most people don't care enough about it until it is actually
lost. There is a long time between something being actively used and cared
about to being obsolete and then to be collected.
-----Original Message-----
From: Michael Kerpan via cctalk
Sent: Friday, November 19, 2021 9:21 PM
To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts
Subject: The precarious state of classic software and hardware preservation
The recent discussion of the sudden disappearance of DtCyber and the
various classic CDC software to run on it from the Internet has got me
thinking about just how precarious so much of computer history is in. So
much of what's out there online (and in person) today is at risk just
vanishing if whoever maintains the archive either loses interest (lots of
projects over the years succumb to this) , or rage quits (see the
expungement of DtCyber and Controlfreaks from the internet), or ends up
dying without having made proper arrangements (See the sad fate of the
Living Computer Museum, which was killed by its new owners as soon as COVID
gave them an excuse to do so)
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.
Mike
--
This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software.
https://www.avast.com/antivirus
12:23 p.m.
On Fri, Nov 19, 2021, at 6:21 PM, Michael Kerpan via cctalk wrote:
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.
Mike
Unfortunately, we're just not doing enough. I don't have an answer, but for
several years I worked for the LOCKSS project at Stanford University. Their software is
open source, and is used to archive online academic journals in a distributed,
fault-tolerant peer to peer network (their primary research was on how to prevent bitrot
and enable automatic format migration, for example). With some effort, it could be
retooled into a general-purpose software archive, but I don't think anybody has ever
seriously proposed doing that. I only point it out as inspiration for one possible way to
do things.
Until we have a better answer, we're just at the mercy of bitrot, and we have to
accept that.
-Seth
--
Seth Morabito
Poulsbo, WA
web at loomcom.com
1:22 p.m.
Unfortunately, we're just not doing enough. I
don't have an answer, but for several years I worked for the LOCKSS project at
Stanford University. Their software is open source, and is used to archive online academic
journals in a distributed, fault-tolerant peer to peer network (their primary research was
on how to prevent bitrot and enable automatic format migration, for example). With some
effort, it could be retooled into a general-purpose software archive, but I don't
think anybody has ever seriously proposed doing that. I only point it out as inspiration
for one possible way to do things.
Until we have a better answer, we're just at the mercy of bitrot, and we have to
accept that.
Unless, of course, you have a mainframe shop and figured all this shit
out back in the 1960s.
--
Will
1:36 p.m.
On Sat, Nov 20, 2021, at 1:22 PM, William Donzelli wrote:
Unless, of course, you have a mainframe shop and
figured all this shit
out back in the 1960s.
Figuring things out accomplishes very little if what was figured out is not broadly
applied.
-Seth
--
Seth Morabito
Poulsbo, WA
web at loomcom.com
6:05 p.m.
Unless, of
course, you have a mainframe shop and figured all this shit
out back in the 1960s.
Figuring things out accomplishes very little if what was figured out is not broadly
applied.
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