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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.
Its not aging, commercialism has pushed everything else out. Its a purposeful destroying of the past so only the present can be focused on (i.e. selling you shit)
Good-bye
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.
Its not aging, commercialism has pushed everything else out. Its a purposeful destroying of the past so only the present can be focused on (i.e. selling you shit)
I am inquiring where the best location for tin foil sales would be? Or, if you know how to make it at home, I would be happier with free range foil. Can you help a pal out?
captch: slowdown
In the last 5 or 6 years there has been a rising awareness of network security and a lot of these old services where probably significant liabilities that where little used and already had been largely replaced with web based versions.
Its not aging, commercialism has pushed everything else out.
Sorry, but wrong. The creation of a commercial site somewhere on the web does not "push out" another site or server. It's not a zero sum game; one old site has to die when a new site is created. I've had a website online for most of that 23 years. I've never once gotten a notice from anyone that the space we needed by Amazon or any other commercial internet data provider. True, I no longer run a gopher or WAIS server, but that's because as the operating systems updated those servers were no longer part of the distributions.
What this nit is complaining about is that a 23 year old book on technology talks about technology that has been obsolete for a long time already. Does he expect to buy a book on analog TV transmission technology and expect to find a plethora of analog TV stations he can access?
I have a book on early radio technology that I could sell him -- but he'd going to be very disappointed when he cannot find all the spark gap transmitters it talks about.
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.).