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I Bought a Book About the Internet From 1994 and None of the Links Worked (vice.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report (condensed for space and clarity): For crate-diggers of all stripes, the internet is awesome for one reason: The crate never ends. There's always something new to find online, because people keep creating new things to throw into that crate. But that crate has a hole at the bottom. Stuff is falling out just as quickly, and pieces of history that would stick around in meatspace disappear in an instant online. So as a result, there aren't a lot of websites from 1995 that made it through to the present day. Gopher sites? Odds are low. Text files? Perhaps. The endless pace of linkrot has left books about the internet in a curious limbo -- they're dead trees about the dead-tree killer, after all. [...] Recently, I bought a book -- a reference book, the kind that you can still pick up at Barnes and Noble today. The book, titled Free $tuff From the Internet (Coriolis Group Books, 1994), promises to help you find free content online. And, crucially, it focuses less on the web, which was still quite young, than on many of the alternative protocols of the era. This book links to FTP sites, telnet servers, and Gopher destinations, and I've tried many of them in an effort to figure out whether something, anything in this book works in the present day. These FTP servers were often based at universities which have a vested interest in keeping information online for a long-term period -- think the University of North Carolina, or Kansas State University. But despite this, I could not get most of these servers to load -- they were long ago murdered by the World Wide Web.
Try the Internet time machine with those links, it might work and that's its purpose.
https://archive.org/web/
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
>These FTP servers were often based at universities which have a vested interest in keeping information online for a long-term period -- think the University of North Carolina, or Kansas State University.
No love for wuarchive.wustl.edu?
I could not get most of these servers to load -- they were long ago murdered by the World Wide Web.
Try back 10 years ago in 2005, and you would likely find a LOT more of the 1994 stuff still working then.
I noticed in the more recent 5 or 6 years, a TON of old stuff finally vanished for once and for all.
This is the aging of the network though --- things go offline, and if the information didn't make it to Archive.org; I guess it's probably gone forever.
the alternative protocols of the era
The modern web is now a clusterfuck. It might be time to dust off some of those old protocols, update them for the modern era without introducing all the problems that the web has been infested with, and start moving everything that matters over there. With appropriate updates, it could be end to end encrypted 100% of the time, and it could go a long ways to punt the surveillance-internet back to the marketeers from whence it came, especially with default onion routing.
The web had a good run. Time to accept that it is no longer salvageable, and we've got to start anew. Yes, eventually the new thing would succumb to the same idiocy that the web did, but at least we'd have (hopefully...) a decade or two of peace before Eternal September 2.0.
A book from 1994 doesn't even have wifi.
Plenty of early commercial internet sites needed to disappear in my opinion. Some still need to.
You can't just leave FTP servers and the like out there for the sake of nostalgia. All these resources require constant maintenance in order to keep them on-line, secure from vandals, etc. Perhaps most critically, it requires constant maintenance to keep them secure from delivering malicious content to people like the article writer.
There is also a difference between keeping content online in perpetuity, and keeping it online in the exact same way. Content worth saving (and pretty much everything else) is still available via the Wayback Machine, search engines, etc. That's why we don't need books and why we don't have to maintain decrepit technologies.
I used to know my way around some ftp servers. I knew (and still know) the exact path and filenames to linux kernels and slackware floppies. I could type wget and get exactly what I wanted before any search engines.
.exe files.
Now I google up files and get a hundred sites; all suspicious and the files download as
ftp.cdrom.com was one ftp server that should not have been killed.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
Not going to happen. Ever. The Web happened because nobody in power was ready for it. Now they are. Your "new web" would be declared illegal and you would find yourself arrested before you even know it. It's over. We had our chance and we blew it.
A bunch of links to free stuff are dead 23 years later? The random BBS cowboys (I myself was one of them, oh, 25 years ago - long live the Syosset BBS!) all aged out or died or just gave it up like myself, and with no viable income model, who thought anyone would replace them?
I remembered the Internet Yellow Pages (dead tree version) back in the mid-1990's when I was going to college. Back then it made sense because search engines were still a few years off. I'm surprised that the last edition still listed on Amazon was 2007.
I'm surprised you even found your way back online to report the fact that your internet reference books from a quarter century ago had dead links.
Get with the times doesn't even begin to describe the problem of failing to understand that not everything is timeless in this world.
This does not surprise me. It would be like opening the White Pages to a random listing, and seeing if the number is still active and reaches the same person. Things on the Internet are, and always have been, much more fluid.
I'll agree that Universities have a vested interest in the preservation of knowledge, and so should do better. On the other hand, there are plenty of other changes to this or that university that have happened out in meatspace in the prior 25 years or so. Most of the buildings of my alma mater are still where they used to be, but their function (e.g., the departments that live in them) are not all the same. And certainly a lot of those physical spaces have received renovations over the years, resulting in walls that have been added, moved, or eliminated; outlets and network ports that aren't the same.
I'd wager a bunch of the content of that book is still out there, somewhere. And a lot of it is probably still at whatever custodian institution used to have it. Good luck finding it, though.
Same AC you replied to here. Sadly, as much as I want to think you're wrong... you're probably right. At least in general terms, if not in specifics. It couldn't succeed.
This is a consequence of one of the best design decisions Tim Berners-Lee and his colleagues made. For decades some of the brightest people in the world had been struggling to perfect a distributed hyperinformation system suitable for general everyday use - but no one had succeeded. Then along came the CERN crew, and pulled it off almost immediately. Their secret? Leaving stuff out!
As a result, the Web has no standard mechanisms for cleaning up. We get broken links. We get cobweb sites that haven't changed for years, and - much worse IMHO - we get valuable pages that vanish because the funding dried up, the maintainer moved to a new post, or for a thousand other reasons.
Early versions of Netscape Communicator had two options for emailing a Web page: send just the URL, or send the whole page. After a while the second option was discontinued - presumably on legal grounds, as it was a tragedy on practical grounds. There are still add-ons that include the whole page, but presumably that's sufficiently arms-length that no one with any serious money is exposed to lawsuits. Or you could write your own. If you really need to refer back to material years or decades later, you just have to keep a copy of your own.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
We are talking about a 23 year old book. This was back when there were only 4 states of matter, typical modem connection speed was 14.4kbaud, 28.8k is you were lucky.
Would you expect a 23 year old address directory be accurate today? Or a 23 year old telephone book?
Fight Spammers!
My post was buried in an earlier article. Editors on Slashdot rearrange what posts show up for different users.
You seem to be new here. Are you aware that when you post, your reply seems to be the first right underneath the post you replied to but, if you reload the page, your reply will move all the way to the last reply?
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
Glad to know my all time favorite web site is still around and kickin it all these years later!
http://www.something.com/
...and you are trying to fix a problem traced to a specific line of source code:
You could be thinking, "stackoverflow? That site died 10 years ago. I'm SOL!"
I actually have a WROX book that says to see a stackoverflow link for details.
Table-ized A.I.
A similar thing happened to me. I found a telephone book from 1990 and none of the phone numbers were accurate either.
Also, I rediscovered a stash of business cards I received from colleagues and business associates back in the 80s and not only were the phone numbers wrong, so were most of the mailing addresses (and NONE of the fax numbers worked!)
Why is this news? Contact information changes. Is it because "it's on a computer" that it is suddenly noteworthy?
(That said, I really miss the days of logging in anonymously to FTP sites to see if there was new stuff to download. There was always an aura of mystery and surprise that is missing from modern archives which very dutifully have change logs telling you what's been added and removed. And no nasty SysOp telling you that you've exceeded your download quota either.).
Garbage rots.
Gold is forever.
Much more than that - there's choice, "oldest first", "newest first", etc. With visibility flavored by personal preference such as giving more weight to up-moderated posts, etc.
/. editors quite obviously don't even spend much time editing, they certainly don't move posts around. Witness all the crude AC posts which appear near the top if browsing at threshold -1.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Headline says: I Bought a Book About the Internet From 1994 and ***None*** of the Links Worked [enphasis mine]
Summary says: But despite this, I could not get ***most*** of these servers to load [enphasis mine]
Way to go, slashdot editor!
I am certain that a Link to www.yahoo.com is in the book, and Still works. Unless you are trying to use the Mosaic Browser that was in the 5.1/4" 1,2Mbyte Disk that came with the book.
*** Suerte a todos y Feliz dia!
Did you buy in half price books or some flea market? Or at a new book store, a recent reprinting?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
>>But that crate has a hole at the bottom. Stuff is falling out just as quickly, and pieces of history that would stick around in meatspace disappear in an instant online.
I call shenanigans! I have been told for years anything I put on the web is there for ever. Is this suddenly not the case?! Ugh.. Wait.. I can work in this confines. If only my tasteful junk pictures are free to loaf around for an eternity then I just need to paper clip them to any work, link, or site so THEY stay around as long too!
I found an old 1985 guide book for massage parlors in New York. I went to an address and asked a costumed woman dressed as a princess for a Vietnamese sandwich and a happy ending, Turned out the place is now a Disney Store. Whoops. Awkward!
Things that are not relevant anymore are gonna be scrapped, things that might have some use will be preserved... that is, while the organizations behind preservation efforts still live.
On a brighter tone, I was plenty pleased to see most of the games I played as a kid and teen back in the 80s-90s were mostly preserved with DosBox and other emulators efforts.
I think I also have a bunch of Flash stuff stored somewhere just in case. Most of the animations got converted to video and are still on YouTube, but I'm not sure about the games and interactive stuff.
It's almost as if print isn't the best media for cataloging the Internet. I'm getting on the phone with my publishers right now and pulling my printed copy of DNS records from shelves.
How is your post buried? It's right there, where it should be. It was the first reply to this comment. Where else should it be?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
You just can't have a bunch on unmaintained zombie web sites running around infecting everyone, now can we?
Sounds like someone needs to use APK's hosts file engine. It was last effective at about that time as well so it might make things work now.
stupid design to keep moving stuff
But also game servers, for example old versions of Phantasy Star Online which have gone dark.
Someone should create a series of DNS servers that each captures a moment in time and seamlessly directs queries to modern equivalents or Wayback archives. Just pick the year you want, select the appropriate DNS server, and off you go, surfing or gaming as if it were 1997 again.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
> I Bought a Book About the Internet From 1994 and None of the Links Worked
That sounds like a geek equivalent to a blonde joke. Like "I bought a coupon book at a garage sale but all the coupons had expired".
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Witness all the crude AC posts which appear near the top if browsing at threshold -1.
And, unfortunately, the Slashdot option which purportedly allows you to change the lower threshold for which you see posts has been broken for several years - so, if you didn't change that setting long ago, you cannot avoid all those crap posts now.
#DeleteChrome
Welcome to San Sequestro.
Did you check with the shop if you can get a refund on the book?
I bought a map of America from 1842 and it was ALL WRONG!
Wikipedia is much more informative nowadays than it used to be back then. The need for obscure websites on obscure topics is gone.
Until a Wikipedia editor proposes deletion of the articles about said topics for lack of "notability", or coverage in sources that meet Wikipedia's vague definition of reliability.
ftp.cdrom.com was one ftp server that should not have been killed.
It has a direct successor in the Walnut Creek CD-ROM archive.
Stack Exchange makes data dumps of Stack Overflow and its other Q&A sites available through the Internet Archive.
And no nasty SysOp telling you that you've exceeded your download quota either.
Download quotas are still around. File-sending services impose quotas on non-paying users, and ISPs impose them even on paying users.
I cringe whenever I see the phrase, "but despite." It's a shame to see language so mangled.
Is this a "feature" of the latest interface? Yet another reason why Classic > *
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I bought a book on medieval history and all the people mentioned there are dead. What a failure.
About six years ago I tried something similar. While digging through an old backup from 1997 I ran across an old list of links I had used on a regular basis. It was kind of interesting to go through the list and see what was still around. I put up a blog post about it at the time.
http://technohat.blogspot.com/2011/09/old-links.html
I think the original book was called 'The Whole Internet' published in 1992 https://books.google.ca/books/about/The_Whole_Internet.html?id=YZRHAAAAMAAJ&redir_esc=y&hl=en
I remember when I spent hours with this book and a three inch thick gatefold printout of ftp sites. Back when things were simpler and there was no google.
prep.ai.mit.edu still works!
My .ncftp-file was last updated in 1994, March 12, and contains these sites:
prep.ai.mit.edu
sunsite.unc.edu
spcot.sanders.com
harbor.ecn.purdue.edu
The first one, the home of GNU, still works and is being updated with the latest of GNU software. The others doesn't work anymore.
This guy's name is Ernie, but he's writing a story as if he's like 15 and never knew about the good ol' days. Either his parents hate him, or he was targeting a younger crowd.
Due to XHTML2 not being backward compatible
Yeah, I'm sure that's it. You know that there was still a DOCTYPE tag in HTML, right?
The more you people strive to be indelible, the more ephemeral you make yourselves.
Either 92 or 95. I used it in my first web class a few years before I got my first internet connection at home (Intro to Web Design with.... HTML 3.1? 3.51?) Then javascript came and changed everything, but not enough without java or flash to do anything useful until HTML4+XML+DOM and then HTML5 with Websockets/Local Storage changed it all.
Would it kill people to use paragraphs when typing long texts? Many of these articles are painful to read.