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I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked

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Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked

#21

Man, I really miss FTP. I remember when you would just FTP to the site you were using and grab a binary from their /pub/. Mirrors were plentiful, and FXP could distribute files without needing a shell on a file server.

I really miss gopher...

Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked

#22
post #8

This is a very important reason why books, in general, contain better information that websites. On websites, people care a lot less about the correctness of the information. You can just update stuff later (of course, this doesn't always happen). Also, sites are a very volatile medium. I often bookmark pages with interesting information to read later, and it inevitably happens once in a while that a site went down a…

> Also, sites are a very volatile medium. I often bookmark pages with interesting information to read later, and it inevitably happens once in a while that a site went down and I just can't find the information anymore. I had the same experience and that's why I made a browser extension that archives pages when you bookmark them. ( https://github.com/rahiel/archiveror )

Maybe something that archives to IPFS would be interesting. As things are marked as interesting, they are both archived and distributed based on interest.

Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked

#24
See also: Best of the Web '94 Awards. Presented at the First International Conference on the World-Wide Web, Geneva, Switzerland, May 1994.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_International_Conference...

What's cool isn't how fast some of these technologies become obsolete, such as various Java applets and cgi-bin connected webcams. It's the static content that can survive until the end of time.

Like Nicolas Pioch's Web Museum. Bienvenue!

http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/

Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked

#25

I Bought a Book of Restaurant Recommendations from 1957 and None of them would Serve Me Dinner Any More

I bought a book from 1850, and I could still look up all the references in a university library, or even find most of them on Google Book Search.

Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked

#27
post #3

Linkrot is a real problem. Especially for those sites that disappear before the archive can get to them. On another note, the more dynamic the web becomes the harder it will be to archive so if you think that the 1994 content is a problem wait until you live in 2040 and you want to read some pages from 2017.

Server-side rendering please save us.

Well, there's now Chrome headless which is slowly edging out PhantomJS for such use cases.

Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked

#29
post #22
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also, sites are a very volatile medium. I often bookmark pages with interesting information to read later, and it inevitably happens once in a while that a site went down and I just can't find the information anymore. I had the same experience and that's why I made a browser extension that archives pages when you bookmark them. ( https://github.com/rahiel/archiveror )

Maybe something that archives to IPFS would be interesting. As things are marked as interesting, they are both archived and distributed based on interest.

[deleted]

Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked

#30

I Bought a Book of Restaurant Recommendations from 1957 and None of them would Serve Me Dinner Any More

I bought a book from 1850, and I could still look up all the references in a university library, or even find most of them on Google Book Search.

Not all information on the Internet is created equal and not all information needs to be available in perpetuity.

"Free $tuff From the Internet" from 23 years ago is closer to a restaurant guide than a book containing literary or academic references. I'd imagine most of the references in an 1850s coupon book or almanac would also be long dead.

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