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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

#61

Post by miguelrochefort »

Jtsummers wrote: post #47
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.

IPFS is good and useful, but it only retains what people choose to retain. If geocities.com/aoeu isn't popular, then IPFS won't store it unless someone bothered to pin it. And as soon as they stop, it'll disappear. You need a dedicated host (like archive.org) to retain it, or volunteers willing to coordinate and commit their resources. Otherwise it's just more resilient (a good thing), but not permanent.

Hello fellow dvorakist!

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

#62

Post by aidenn0 »

rffn wrote: post #34

Lycos and Yahoo are still around. The book really does not have them?

Those were both founded in 1994, and the book spent relatively little time discussing the web (much of which still works, according to the article, despite the headline)

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

#63

Post by adventured »

ChrisSD wrote: post #39

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: htt…

There's always the famous Dole Kemp '96 campaign site (a fair representation of mid 1990s web design):

http://www.dolekemp96.org/main.htm

And this one from CNN (still 1996, but appropriate representation of that 1995/96 era when design had changed a bit from the earlier plain white backgrounds & basic text layouts):

http://edition.cnn.com/EVENTS/1996/year.in.review/

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

#64

Post by conradfr »

peterwwillis wrote: post #56
AznHisoka wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I miss that "UH-OH" sound from WS_FTP

Me too. Here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gl99t4S3ChM

It's the same as for an ICQ message?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6iCPIUGnHQ8

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

#65

Post by rayiner »

ChrisSD wrote: post #39

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: htt…

God I miss when the web was designed for people who could read.

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

#66

Post by SubiculumCode »

andai wrote: post #44
SubiculumCode wrote: post #35

The solution to link rot (and to privacy invasion) is to download the internet.

Could you please clarify?

1. Download the internets. 2. git the diffs.

Privacy comes because if everyone has the internet in their local cache (lol), then external servers can't say what YOU are REALLY looking at.

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

#67

Post by Sleeep »

gaius wrote: post #17
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 remember when you could just mount \\ftp.microsoft.com\pub as a drive on your PC. Raw, unauthenticated, unencrypted SMB over the public Internet. At least it was read-only share. Good times.

I remember Geocities pages would always be trying to read from my floppy drive. People would not realize you had to upload your pictures before other people could see them and just would put D:\pictures\goatse.jpg as the src of the img tag because they didn't really understand the web (not that I blame them.) Of course, the browser had no problem trying to load local images from untrusted code on a remote host, security policies were, uh, extremely permissive at the time.

(Of course, there would be plenty of attempting to read from the C:\ drive too, but that didn't make a loud, unexpected sound like reading from the floppy drive did)

Simple times.

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

#68

Post by LoSboccacc »

whatever_dude wrote: post #15

I've had a similar problem. In updating my portfolio site recently, I noticed a vast majority of links were dead. Not just live projects published maybe 3 years or more ago (I expect those to die). But also links to articles and mentions from barely one year ago, or links to award sites, and the like. With a site listing projects going back ~15 years, one can imagine how bad things were. I had to end up creating a li…

beware: robots.txt can retroactively clear archive.org data

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

#70

Post by 77pt77 »

CharlesDodgson wrote: post #45

I 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 just miss that it was mainly text and could be used in a terminal without missing much.

More content density, better S/N ratio.

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