Happy to take them.
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Ask HN: What to do with text from old, unarchived, online forums?
101–110 of 112 posts
Re: Ask HN: What to do with text from old, unarchived, online forums?
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
Very often you could be using a 'fast' internet connection (T1 at school, library), and you could easily download an entire floppy disk in a minute or two. And it was unlikely you had a CD-RW drive (maaaybe a Zip disk), so it'd be hard to take it home and you wouldn't be able to save it locally. Heck, even if you could save it locally, you might have only had a 500MB hard drive, it seems weird now because with TB dri…
> you might have only had a 500MB hard drive I mean that was already a massive amount of storage for plain text. > you could easily download an entire floppy disk in a minute or two And how does printing it on paper help with that? If anything, switching out the floppies and carrying them home is faster and easier than with hundreds (or thousands) of pages. But I get your overall point of transferring the content hom…
Printing stuff at school/work made it really easy to read stuff when you didn't have a computer at home. Besides the fact computers had fewer resources all around, personal ownership of computers was still a minority at the time. A floppy disk could store a bunch of text files but didn't do you a lot of good if you didn't have a computer at home.
Re: Ask HN: What to do with text from old, unarchived, online forums?
#103Its a shame, Google used to host Usenet groups and the other day I clicked a link of something old that Google was supposed to be hosting, and got literally nothing back. Dear Google, you could have added ads to those old results to justify keeping them up, but you failed because you're more interested in locking things down than actually building up an open web. Now there's decades worth of old usenet content probab…
The added irony is that the oldest threads are the most interesting.
Re: Ask HN: What to do with text from old, unarchived, online forums?
#104A question from someone a bit younger: What was the purpose of printing out online discussions? Was it to read them while not at the computer? Was it to physically archive them?
If you wanted to read at your couch or in the café it was the only viable option.
Reading at the desk was ok, but your CRT monitor was often low res and somewhat flickery (depending how sensitive to that you are).
Laptops (once they existed) had hilariously short battery life and dismal lcd based screens. I wouldn't recommend it.
I think I stopped printing stuff out pretty much exactly when laptops got good enough to use instead.
Re: Ask HN: What to do with text from old, unarchived, online forums?
#105Related, I have a lot of IRC logs form 1997-2004. Is there somehow an IRC archive project?
Jason has posted elsewhere in this post, but textfiles.com is a safe bet for a future home for nearly any kind of log of that sort.
Re: Ask HN: What to do with text from old, unarchived, online forums?
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
A quick google search reveals that laptops and smartphones didnt exist back then.
What does that have to do with anything? Disk drives did exist.
Which were connected to the very expensive machine that a whole household shared.
In mid-late 90s central Texas, a well-off family might have had one PC and a second phone line shared between Internet access and the kids, as well as a dot matrix printer or even an inkjet (ink was a LOT cheaper back then), but only the most indulged (or nerdy, spending their savings on that instead of driving expenses) kids would have had their own PCs.
Re: Ask HN: What to do with text from old, unarchived, online forums?
#107Its a shame, Google used to host Usenet groups and the other day I clicked a link of something old that Google was supposed to be hosting, and got literally nothing back. Dear Google, you could have added ads to those old results to justify keeping them up, but you failed because you're more interested in locking things down than actually building up an open web. Now there's decades worth of old usenet content probab…
The added irony is that the oldest threads are the most interesting.
Yeah they really are. I would have paid Google $3 a month just for them to keep them online on the odd chance I want to read them. Shit Google, make a usenet service for me to subscribe to, it'll be the only thing you'll have with me giving you money.
Re: Ask HN: What to do with text from old, unarchived, online forums?
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
You have to remember that there was a time when phone lines and internet connections shared resources. Also, the internet wasn't nearly as fast as it is now, even a decade ago, so printing meant you had that copy locally without needing to wait for load times. I have a couple of GameFAQs discussions and cheat lists for various PS2/GameCube games from the early 2000s. They're stowed in a folder because it was a hassle…
I too had printed copies of web pages (mostly cheats and guides for games that you simply couldn't access while a game was running!) but if I were to print out entire forum discussions, my parents would've killed me for using so much precious printer ink (and paper, probably). So while I understand the need for printing out stuff back then, I'm a bit puzzled why someone would print out forum discussions per se.
I printed forum threads on OS installation/dual booting/BIOS stuff that I might need not having a phone with web access or another computer.
That's quite specific, but just one example. I think we could imagine a scenario where you might have printed any instructional thread. The interview transcriptions mentioned could've been for offline interview prep.
Re: Ask HN: What to do with text from old, unarchived, online forums?
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://help.archive.org/help/how-to-upload-files-to-create-... https://github.com/jjjake/internetarchive might be helpful If you have an artifact in digital format already, you can self serve and don't need my help. Patron services at the org can provide guidance if you are unsure of item value, upload mechanics, collections, metadata, etc.
I ran a website where people uploaded game save files along with an screenshot of their game world for a few years. It had maybe 10k+ submissions and was a mildly popular game. I took it offline years ago though. Is this something worth archiving?
Yes, please consider doing so.