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.

Comments

Internet time machine

[ls671]

Try the Internet time machine with those links, it might work and that's its purpose.

https://archive.org/web/

Re:Internet time machine

[strstr]

there's no way you thought "some asswipe is making a bunch of money selling this to suckers who don't know what a search engine is."

the reason is search engines didn't really exist yet. the year 1995 is when the first engines launched, and they were not very complete. My understanding is Yahoo! search launched in March 1995.

basically everyone at the time was basically designing the internet still. they were just learning the internet, and search engines were not yet the "go to" that everyone knew. of course books were wrote, because things like search engines were not common place.

a lot of the internet was laid out like the story tells. lots of thinks on telnet, gopher, ftp, and the like, and not web pages like HTTP. there were tons of HTTP, fan pages of celebrity pics were popular.. tons of fan site/individual set up sites were what was hot. many popular sites that would later grow into large mega sites, started off as fan sites, made by regular people. some were sites started by large corporations.

search engines back then sucked so bad you could not even find stuff. when google launched in 2000 it was better, people switched to it pretty fast, seemingly because it provided better results.

many search engines did exist. they were popular to use in 2000. sites like lycos, ultavista, AOL, yahoo, etc... as I stated results sometimes sucked though.

anyway if you were thinking that, that's weird. lol.

Re:Mrs. Mash's AGENDA!

[ls671]

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?

Re:Mrs. Mash's AGENDA!

[msauve]

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.

Re:Like ftp.cdrom.com ?

[snookiex]

So she found your 1994 porn stash?

Re:More recently obliterated

[AmiMoJo]

Not commercialism, bandwidth. Home internet connections got much faster. People running the FTP servers found their traffic rising fast, exponentially. They either had to pay for a lot more bandwidth or shut up shop.