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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.
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.
I've downloaded some of those old CDs from sites like that.
They're full to the brim with viruses, and, strangely, occasionally porn. Like, who puts porn PCX files in shareware games?
Fun sidestory: My wife woke me up one night at like 4 AM, "I found your PORN STASH", I get up, look at the her with her "I caught you" judging stare, and I look at the screen. Those PCX files from shareware. I point at the datestamp, "1994", and I go back to sleep.