The precarious state of classic software and hardware preservation

[Bill Degnan]

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
> >> 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.
>
> bill
>
>