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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

#31

Post by edgarvaldes »

jacobolus wrote: post #25
garethsprice wrote: post #23

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.

I think this is a best (but not perfect) analogy for hyperlinks.

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

#32

Post by jharger »

acdha wrote: post #12
peterwwillis wrote: post #9

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 don't remember that era working all that well except if you were only talking about personal homepages at a few large universities. FTP was a bit faster at first but the experience of tracing around an unfamiliar directory hierarchy and guessing at naming conventions is not something I get nostalgic about. Also, consider that right-click save as works the vast majority of the time and the exceptions are for content…

The unfamiliar directory structure was always an issue, but even worse was using ftp on windows, which defaulted the transfer mode to ASCII, so if you forgot to change it, you'd end up with corrupt files most of the time.

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

#33

Post by rahiel »

TheAnimus wrote: post #6
jacquesm wrote: 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.

Turns out the solution to every stack overflow post will be "JavaScript is required"

Content from Stack Overflow has higher odds to survive than this, they've uploaded a data dump of all user-contributed data to archive.org: https://archive.org/details/stackexchange. It's all plaintext. This is really generous of Stack Exchange and shows they care for the long-term.

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

#36

Post by jacquesm »

amelius wrote: post #20

Solution: https://ipfs.io > The average lifespan of a web page is 100 days. Remember GeoCities? The web doesn't anymore. It's not good enough for the primary medium of our era to be so fragile. > IPFS provides historic versioning (like git) and makes it simple to set up resilient networks for mirroring of data.

> Remember GeoCities? The web doesn't anymore.

Bad example:

http://reocities.com/

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

#38

Post by Retric »

garethsprice wrote: post #23

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

There are plenty of restaurants that are older than 1957. So, you would probably find at least one that was still open. I think the oldest in the US is Fraunces Tavern. New York, NY. 1762.

But, worldwide several predate that. Botin Restaurant dates back it 1725... Oldest I could find was Stiftskeller St. Peter. Salzburg, Austria is still in the same building from ~803.

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

#39

Post by ChrisSD »

Related 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: https://archive.org/details/bbcnc.org.uk-19950301

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