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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?
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.