61–70 of 89 posts
For anyone in Australia, it would be cheaper to pay them to put the data on a HDD, wrap it in bacon and hand deliver it - rather than download the torrent.
Really? I'm seeding it from Adelaide. There are options besides whatever Telstra shovels your way in most areas, you just have to poke around. How would you like your bacon cooked?
For anyone in Australia, it would be cheaper to pay them to put the data on a HDD, wrap it in bacon and hand deliver it - rather than download the torrent.
That was in Sydney though, last year.
I like the concept of "Digital Heritage" as they call it. I think preserving digital heritage may become an important issue in the next few years. As the world begins to recognize the historic legacy of the web, it may someday become as important as preserving physical historical landmarks. Its time to accept that the internet may be the greatest legacy 21st century civilization leaves behind. It likely isn't going a…
Charles Stross has an excellent novel, "Glasshouse", a major plot point of which is that due to shoddy digital preservation practices, far-future historians know virtually nothing about ≈1950 through ≈2050 or so. What little they know is pieced together from fragmentary bits and pieces of evidence, with results that are at turns hilarious and horrifying when "put into practice" by historical re-enactors. Kind of remi…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I imagine at least somebody will download to a server and host them all there. Might grab a new 1TB drive into one of my servers and do it if I'm bored enough...
I've been doing that for the last 12 months, and the collection is significantly larger than that. http://www.reocities.com/
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Was under construction the first web meme? All these people couldn't have arrived at the same metaphor individually (as obvious as it is).
Check out http://www.metafilter.com/85695/Please-Be-Patient-This-Page-... for a person's story of how he made the first animated GIFs.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wow, when did those disappear? That phrase immediately brought me back to ~1994. :)
Disappear? webring.com is still there. I dare you to enter "goth poetry" in its search window. Double dare, as a matter of fact.
Skeletal Lovers
Two dead people
Embraced even in death
They lie there for eternity
Together forever
Memories turned to dust
Laughter and sin forgotten
Nothing but pale white bone
Nothing to complain about
Only the two of them
Forever together
The early web is a treasure trove of an interesting time in history. It was the first time average people could just write public documents to express themselves.
Naturally the pages were terrible, covered in things that look good the first time you see it, pointless opinions and personal shrines to obscure relics of pop-culture.
The web is still the same, but more everyday. Companies work day and night to have a web presence, and "using the internet" is synonymous with replying to status and 'liking' things.
Geocities, AOL Homepages, and tripod are landmarks of the first time in history someone could just make a page about themselves, or something they liked and _anyone_ could see it. It was society making paintings on caves.
Unfortunately, these sites don't produce revenue, and never will, so from a corporate point of view, they are worthless.
The early era of the web is like trying to find rare music. Of course there is a modern site, a torrent, or some convenient way to find most of what you want. What you find is at best, the same thing everyone else finds. The old web is full of non-technical people earnestly trying to make something, not a startup, not to sell a book, just trying to put something together which is largely lost in the ease of "List your favorite bands"
Not that it was better, or more insightful, simply that it is a huge body of primitive work that is unlikely to be recreated. These things should be stored, if for no other reason than we can see the bloviated opinions of mensans, the C-style poetry of 90's sysadmins, or just the insane ramblings of people who think like Gene Ray, but don't have the perseverence to keep up timecube.
The sites are a labor of love, no matter the revenue, and it annoys me to no end that AOL or Yahoo has the power to simply delete these old sites because they don't make business sense, to businesses that don't even know what they are doing.
Anyway, as someone who mirrored a few old HomePages and Geocities sites, and backs up pieces of the old internet whenever I can find them, this is a breath of fresh air.