5 ms·

>There’s little to no information on the internet about it or its inventor, except for these photographs for a LIFE magazine article which may never have been p

>There’s little to no information on the internet about it or its inventor, except for these photographs for a LIFE magazine article which may never have been published. It's crazy to me that there is no record of this beyond these photographs considering how many people must have known the inventor, used this, or had friends that did, but then again I haven't spent much time in the pre-internet world. People looking back on today's daily life 65 years from now will have a lot of information.

obilgic 11y ago
soon pre-internet will feel like pre-writing.
5ilv3r 11y ago
"will have a lot of information." I don't think they will. Too much data about our lives is locked up and lost by online communities falling apart. Anyone who invested a significant amount of time in myspace probably has nothing to show for that period of their lives, and I worry that the new trend of lifelong facebook use will make that even worse.
- eropple 11y ago
  `salmonet said nothing about individual lives in his post. Facebook disappearing tomorrow wouldn't mean that historians a hundred years from now couldn't get an extremely clear view of what life today is like in aggregate.
  - bkeroack 11y ago
    Have any old Zip disks laying around (or did you ever)? How accessible are the contents to you today? Now imagine trying to get that data 150 years from now.
    - steven777400 11y ago
      Even having the drives may not mitigate issues of that kind. A variety of articles [0] describe unexpectedly (well, to consumers at least) short lifespans on CD-Rs. Lots of CD drives are still around, but you might be unpleasently surprised if you put in a 15 year old CD-R that's been sitting on the shelf. [0] Google search: burned cd lifespan
    - eropple 11y ago
      > Have any old Zip disks laying around (or did you ever)? Nope. Too young for Zip disks. My data's on redundant hard drives in my NAS and has a cloud backup as the braces to that NAS's belt. > Now imagine trying to get that data 150 years from now. I have a remarkable amount of trust and faith in the Internet Archive to continue being excellent at their jobs or others to pick up the slack. This thread reminded me about a project I wanted to bounce off of those folks, too...BRB.
    - greglindahl 11y ago
      The way to save bits is to copy them onto new media every few years. That's what the Internet Archive does -- we're currently phasing out 2 terabyte disks for 8's.
0xdada 11y ago
There's an online game from 2001 that I can't find any information on. I went as far as contacting the trademark owners and even they don't have anything, any source code, any images. Pre-internet and pre-google will probably mean the same soon.
- SixSigma 11y ago
  I've got to ask: which game ?
  - 0xdada 11y ago
    It was a web-based game in Hungary called Virtual Box.
ghaff 11y ago
"Little to no information on the internet" I suspect that if one were sufficiently motivated to do offline research, you could probably find at least some information. If this was notable enough to attract a LIFE photographer--whether or not the article was actually published--I'm pretty sure there would be newspaper articles, etc. about it.

obilgic 11y ago

soon pre-internet will feel like pre-writing.

5ilv3r 11y ago

"will have a lot of information." I don't think they will. Too much data about our lives is locked up and lost by online communities falling apart. Anyone who invested a significant amount of time in myspace probably has nothing to show for that period of their lives, and I worry that the new trend of lifelong facebook use will make that even worse.

eropple 11y ago
`salmonet said nothing about individual lives in his post. Facebook disappearing tomorrow wouldn't mean that historians a hundred years from now couldn't get an extremely clear view of what life today is like in aggregate.
- bkeroack 11y ago
  Have any old Zip disks laying around (or did you ever)? How accessible are the contents to you today? Now imagine trying to get that data 150 years from now.
  - steven777400 11y ago
    Even having the drives may not mitigate issues of that kind. A variety of articles [0] describe unexpectedly (well, to consumers at least) short lifespans on CD-Rs. Lots of CD drives are still around, but you might be unpleasently surprised if you put in a 15 year old CD-R that's been sitting on the shelf. [0] Google search: burned cd lifespan
  - eropple 11y ago
    > Have any old Zip disks laying around (or did you ever)? Nope. Too young for Zip disks. My data's on redundant hard drives in my NAS and has a cloud backup as the braces to that NAS's belt. > Now imagine trying to get that data 150 years from now. I have a remarkable amount of trust and faith in the Internet Archive to continue being excellent at their jobs or others to pick up the slack. This thread reminded me about a project I wanted to bounce off of those folks, too...BRB.
  - greglindahl 11y ago
    The way to save bits is to copy them onto new media every few years. That's what the Internet Archive does -- we're currently phasing out 2 terabyte disks for 8's.

0xdada 11y ago

There's an online game from 2001 that I can't find any information on. I went as far as contacting the trademark owners and even they don't have anything, any source code, any images. Pre-internet and pre-google will probably mean the same soon.

SixSigma 11y ago
I've got to ask: which game ?
- 0xdada 11y ago
  It was a web-based game in Hungary called Virtual Box.

ghaff 11y ago

"Little to no information on the internet" I suspect that if one were sufficiently motivated to do offline research, you could probably find at least some information. If this was notable enough to attract a LIFE photographer--whether or not the article was actually published--I'm pretty sure there would be newspaper articles, etc. about it.