16 Aug
2019
16 Aug
'19
2:21 a.m.
From: Eric Christopherson
> Anyway, the whole 'how do we find the
info' is a part of why I started
> working on CHWiki, once I discovered it
Psst: it would've been a good idea to share the
URL to CHWiki.
Well, that passing reference wasn't an attempt to get people to go look at
it, hence no URL! :-) I was focused on the abstract discussion about 'how do
we make information accessible, if relying on search engines to find blog
postings doesn't work'.
I have on several occasions posted appeals to this list for people to
contribute content to it, and gotten almost no response (with one notable
exception), in terms of added content; that was a large part of why I merely
mentioned it in an offhand way.
a site I was already familiar with, but not under the
name you used for
it.
Ah, formally it's the 'Computer History Wiki', except that's a lot of
typing,
so I've been using 'CHWiki' as a short, easy-to-type, name for it for some
time now.
(It was a bit hard to find with Google, which just
goes to show...)
Yeah, I added "CHWiki" to the text on the Main Page to make it a little easier
to find from the short name, after a previous case where I'd used that term
here, to some people's confusion. But I see it still doesn't work well; I
guess I'll have to add 'CHWiki' links from more pages. Using 'Computer
History
Wiki' as a search term only works slightly better, though; it's at the bottom
of the first page of results for me, below a bunch of Wikipedia links.
Noel
PS: In response to a point raised in a private reply to me; the site is for
_all_ historical computers: personal computers, mainframes, the lot. I myself
have added a lot of PDP-11 material, but only because I'm very fond of them,
and know them well. The field of historial computers is _way_ too broad for
one person to cover in depth, which is part of why I previously appealed to
people who knew/were familar with other corners of it to add detailed content
in those areas.
16 Aug
16 Aug
6:14 a.m.
On 08/15/2019 23:21, Noel Chiappa via cctalk wrote:
I have on several occasions posted appeals to this list for people to
contribute content to it, and gotten almost no response (with one notable
exception), in terms of added content; that was a large part of why I merely
mentioned it in an offhand way.
I don't want to discourage anybody from contributing to this or any
other project. However...
Imagine if you will that many people, over many years, put a lot of work
into pulling information together on a site with forums, and then
distilling that information into a lot of wiki pages. Many discussions
in the forums, with hard-won facts and interesting projects documented
there. Things the manufacturer(s) never admitted you could do! So many
wiki pages carefully explaining things, recording specifications,
procedures, configurations, part numbers, substitutions. An incredibly
useful resource and a very active community.
Then imagine that a law is passed in a far away land, and the site owner
decides it's is too risky to bother with, and they then take the entire
site down - wiki and fora - with no warning and no access to the material...
I'm not arguing against community collaborations at all - I guess I'm
mostly just venting my considerable spleen. :(
But I would strongly suggest that if people are going to do something of
the scale you describe, they might want to consider setting up a
distribution or replication mechanism at their earliest convenience.
--S.
9:35 a.m.
On Aug 16, 2019, at 6:14 AM, Steven M Jones via cctalk
<cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
On 08/15/2019 23:21, Noel Chiappa via cctalk wrote:
You don't even have to assume government malice. Lots of providers have gone out of
business without any warning simply because of not being economically viable. Or even
because the operators decided they weren't interested any longer.
Anything worth having around deserves backup. Which makes me wonder -- how is Wikipedia
backed up? I guess it has a fork, which isn't quite the same thing. I know Bitsavers
is replicated in a number of places. And one argument in favor of GIT is that every
workspace is a full backup of the original, history and all.
One should worry for smaller scale efforts, though.
paul
I have on several occasions posted appeals to
this list for people to
contribute content to it, and gotten almost no response (with one notable
exception), in terms of added content; that was a large part of why I merely
mentioned it in an offhand way.
I don't want to discourage anybody from contributing to this or any other project.
However...
Imagine if you will that many people, over many years, put a lot of work into pulling
information together on a site with forums, and then distilling that information into a
lot of wiki pages. Many discussions in the forums, with hard-won facts and interesting
projects documented there. Things the manufacturer(s) never admitted you could do! So many
wiki pages carefully explaining things, recording specifications, procedures,
configurations, part numbers, substitutions. An incredibly useful resource and a very
active community.
Then imagine that a law is passed in a far away land, and the site owner decides it's
is too risky to bother with, and they then take the entire site down - wiki and fora -
with no warning and no access to the material... 
11:31 a.m.
Paul Koning via cctalk writes:
Anything worth having around deserves backup. Which
makes me wonder
-- how is Wikipedia backed up? I guess it has a fork, which isn't
quite the same thing. I know Bitsavers is replicated in a number of
places. And one argument in favor of GIT is that every workspace is a
full backup of the original, history and all.
One should worry for smaller scale efforts, though.
This is a problem I think about a lot.
In the early 2000s I worked on the LOCKSS program at Stanford
University. LOCKSS stands for "Lots Of Copies Keep Stuff Safe", and is a
distributed network of servers that replicate backup copies of
electronic academic journals. It stemmed from a research project that
looked at how to design an attack resistent peer-to-peer digital
archival network. Each node in the network keeps a copy of the original
journal content, does a cryptographic hash of each resource (HTML page,
image, PDF, etc.), and participates in a steady stream of polls with all
the other nodes where they vote on the hashes. If a minority of nodes
loses a poll, their content is assumed to be damaged, missing, or bad,
and they replicate the content from the winners of the poll.
It's designed as a "Dark" archive, meaning the data is there, but nobody
tries to access it unless the original web content disappears. Then, the
servers act as transparent web proxies, so when you hit the original URL
or URI, they serve up the content that's now missing from the real
public Internet.
It's a neat idea. It's also open source, and unencumbered with
patents. I've always thought a similar model could be used to archive
and replicate just about anything, but it's just one of those things
that nobody's ever gotten around to doing.
paul
-Seth
--
Seth Morabito
Poulsbo, WA, USA
web at loomcom.com
2:26 p.m.
One of the problems with archiving is what to do with items that are not popular. Some
things might be more valued ten or twenty years in the future but not now. Is the fact
that the item has relatively low interest now a possible reason to not archive it in a
searchable form for future reference?
What about things that are scattered on other personal sites currently that may be gone
next week? So much information is already lost.
Who determines what should be saved? What say you come across a rare document but the copy
was poorly done at a lower than desired resolution. Do you refuse to post it because it
doesn't meet your standards or do you post it with a note that it is the best to date?
Judging such things can be arbitrary and be the reason for lost information.
At least when you publish a book, there is a chance that some copy may be saved. Now with
information sitting on someones disk drives, it could be deletes with one mistake.
This is a really complicated issue. I'm getting older and know I'm on the tail end
of my life. Still, I have no way to begin to pass on what I have. I doubt my heirs would
care much unless it had significant monetary value.
Dwight
________________________________
From: cctalk <cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org> on behalf of Seth J. Morabito via
cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
Sent: Friday, August 16, 2019 8:31 AM
To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
Subject: Re: Archiving information, was Re: ADM-3A question
Paul Koning via cctalk writes:
Anything worth having around deserves backup. Which
makes me wonder
-- how is Wikipedia backed up? I guess it has a fork, which isn't
quite the same thing. I know Bitsavers is replicated in a number of
places. And one argument in favor of GIT is that every workspace is a
full backup of the original, history and all.
One should worry for smaller scale efforts, though.
This is a problem I think about a lot.
In the early 2000s I worked on the LOCKSS program at Stanford
University. LOCKSS stands for "Lots Of Copies Keep Stuff Safe", and is a
distributed network of servers that replicate backup copies of
electronic academic journals. It stemmed from a research project that
looked at how to design an attack resistent peer-to-peer digital
archival network. Each node in the network keeps a copy of the original
journal content, does a cryptographic hash of each resource (HTML page,
image, PDF, etc.), and participates in a steady stream of polls with all
the other nodes where they vote on the hashes. If a minority of nodes
loses a poll, their content is assumed to be damaged, missing, or bad,
and they replicate the content from the winners of the poll.
It's designed as a "Dark" archive, meaning the data is there, but nobody
tries to access it unless the original web content disappears. Then, the
servers act as transparent web proxies, so when you hit the original URL
or URI, they serve up the content that's now missing from the real
public Internet.
It's a neat idea. It's also open source, and unencumbered with
patents. I've always thought a similar model could be used to archive
and replicate just about anything, but it's just one of those things
that nobody's ever gotten around to doing.
paul
-Seth
--
Seth Morabito
Poulsbo, WA, USA
web at loomcom.com
7:47 p.m.
Then imagine that a law is passed in a far away land,
and the site owner
decides it's is too risky to bother with, and they then take the entire
site down - wiki and fora - with no warning and no access to the material...
Gosh, Steven, I can't imagine for the *life of me* what site you're
referring to here. I mean, it's not like Some Guy Immediately pulls it
all down on a whim, is it?
;)
--
------------------------------------ personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ --
Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at floodgap.com
-- God may be subtle, but He isn't plain mean. -- Albert Einstein -------------
2:12 p.m.
On Fri, Aug 16, 2019 at 02:21:36AM -0400, Noel Chiappa via cctalk
wrote:
[...]
Yeah, I added "CHWiki" to the text on the
Main Page to make it a
little easier
Because of curiosity, I tried.
On gog:
=== chwiki - because gog discovers I type from Poland and "chwiki"
looks like Polish word "chwili" (a genetivus of "chwila" which means
"moment", or "a second", like "just a second"), so it gave
me page
full of stuff like "this moment is best" or "no better moment than
her touch" (which even for native speaker sounds a bit too contorted,
but gog just indexes whatever garbage local folk produce)
=== computer history wiki - fifth result on first page
=== gunkies - first link on first page
On double duck:
all the same, like above
Please note, for me gunkies.org and http://gunkies.org/wiki/Main_Page
are equals, so I assume finding gunkies.org counts.
--
Regards,
Tomasz Rola
--
** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature. **
** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home **
** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened... **
** **
** Tomasz Rola mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com **
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