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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.
>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.
Try the Internet time machine with those links, it might work and that's its purpose.
https://archive.org/web/
I worked in a bookstore in 1995, and I remember the book mentioned in the article. It stuck out to me as a bullshit "cash in on this newfangled internet thing by publishing a bunch of link" type of book, which there was a lot of back then. I remember thumbing through the pages and thinking "some asswipe is making a bunch of money selling this to suckers who don't know what a search engine is."
Out of curiosity, I copied a bunch of the links down, went home, and most of the links were already dead or virus and ad-infested piles of dogshit.
Point being, books like that one were pieces of shit by the time they hit the printing presses, and are a horrible example of "internet bitrot." I would hope that the Internet Archive doesn't have any of that crap preserved. If you want a better example, go dig up some old programming books that linked to old projects and companies which are now defunct, those might actually BE preserved, and more to the point, be more worthy OF preserving.