I've been an arch linux user for a very long time. I very much praise the documentation and it always gets me 90% of the way there when trying to solve a problem or configure something. But when I need that extra 10% I can usually find someone on the forums with a similar issue and the solution is usually a huge rabbit hole of links and some are broken, which gets really frustrating because I have to hope that it was cached by archive.org.
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
#132I can't even find my own tweets sometimes. We're so screwed.
Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked
#133This reminds me of the Final Fantasy IX strategy guide. It integrated with Square Enix's Play Online service but now that FFIX was removed from Play Online, none of the links work any more and the guide is pretty much useless. I'm sure we'll start to see more of this in the coming years. It's not really sustainable to keep a website running forever.
If the service is still running then the added cost of hosting legacy content is near zero. Assuming the site wasn't full of bandwidth hogging live video or anything like that the cost of storage and hosting are almost zero.
Keeping a whole server running however does get a bit more expensive, but you could also rehost it on a cloud provider for a very modest cost per month.
Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked
#134The article indicates that the "free" stuff on the internet was hidden away in weird places - ftp servers and the like. No google to find it for you, the only way was by word of mouth, or I guess via published book. Answers a question I always had about "Snow Crash" by Neal Stephenson. The main character, Hiro Protagonist (I still giggle at that name), sometimes did work as a kind of data wrangler - "gathering intel…
Of course, still, finding the good stuff, rather than whatever has been SEO'd in the google listings is difficult in some subjects.
Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
Then you'll "love" Microsoft's 1994 page: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/discover/1994/
"WWW.MICROSOFT.COM is running Microsoft's Windows NT Server 3.5 and EMWAC's HTTPS" EMWAC supported TLS 1.2 already back then. Amazing!
Ha, well it is a recreation and obviously not the original. They didn't have the original code so they had to work out how it was made. There's a readme which explains the process: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/discover/1994/readme.html
Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked
#136Related to this, I had trouble finding examples of pre 1996 web design. The internet archive has a lot from 1997 onwards. The oldest live examples of sites from that era, that I know of are: http://www.w3.org/History/19921103-hypertext/hypertext/WWW/T... http://oreilly.com/gnn/gnnhome.html http://www.trincoll.edu/zines/tj/tj12.02.93/tjcontents.html The BBC also donated its Networking Club to the Internet Archive: htt…
https://www.warnerbros.com/archive/spacejam/movie/jam.htm ;)
There's even a Twitter account (created in 2013) that checks if it's still up, every 3 hours.
Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked
#137I miss the optimism of the early web, when you could create a simple web page, join a web ring and going online was an event. It's richer and deeper now, but the rawness and simpleness of it all was enjoyable and novel.
I especially miss the blogosphere of the era 1999-2006, before the emergence of Facebook and Twitter. I miss the era when tech people could debate a new technical protocol by posting thoughtful essays on their blogs, and then other technical people would post rebuttals on their own blogs, and the conversation would go back and forth, among the various blogs, but out in the open, and very democratic. Nowadays a lot of the new protocols are, for all practical purposes, designed inside of Google or Facebook or Apple, and then announced to the world, without much debate.
For a close look at the earlier era, see this very long essay I wrote in 2006 (which was popular back in 2006) in which I summarized the tech world's blog debate about RSS:
http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/rss-has-been-damaged-...
"RSS has been damaged by in-fighting among those who advocate for it"
Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
Mixed example. Only a small fraction of Geocities pages / content have been preserved. Most of it is lost permanently.
Rather the opposite, a very large fraction of the original pages have been preserved. Many of them were deleted long before by the owners themselves and/or rehosted elsewhere. Original Geocities content is probably the oldest large body of internet content that will be preserved for many years to come and it will look roughly how it looked on Geocities because it wasn't relying on much of anything other than basic HT…
For whatever reason, my site (Hollywood/Academy/4430) disappeared from Geocities before the mass archival happened. I certainly didn't delete it.
I search for it once a year, hope springs eternal.
Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked
#139This problem has concerned me for some time. One solution would be for websites to declare their license (Creative Commons, proprietary, public domain, etc.) and then web pages can embed the content of pages linked to when the license allows it.
A web with content-based addressing and versioning built into the protocol could also deal with this situation more gracefully, but again there are copyright issues.
Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked
#140Yup. Recently promised a colleague a pdf. I knew what I was looking for, who wrote it and and which site it was on (regional site of my employer). It even featured highly on google (showed up on related searches).
Zilch. Nada...couldn't find it anymore. Gone. Something I had easily chanced upon before I know couldn't find with directed searching. They must have restructured their site.