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I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked
- kutkloon7 9y agoThis is a very important reason why books, in general, contain better information that websites. On websites, people care a lot less about the correctness of the information. You can just update stuff later (of course, this doesn't always happen). Also, sites are a very volatile medium. I often bookmark pages with interesting information to read later, and it inevitably happens once in a while that a site went down and I just can't find the information anymore.
- concernedctzn 9y agoI have this problem too, thankfully archive.org has been able to resurrect most of the text based sites I bookmarked ages ago. Such an invaluable resource.
- rahiel 9y ago> Also, sites are a very volatile medium. I often bookmark pages with interesting information to read later, and it inevitably happens once in a while that a site went down and I just can't find the information anymore. I had the same experience and that's why I made a browser extension that archives pages when you bookmark them. (https://github.com/rahiel/archiveror https://github.com/rahiel/archiveror)
- kbenson 9y agoMaybe something that archives to IPFS would be interesting. As things are marked as interesting, they are both archived and distributed based on interest.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- j_s 9y agoI collected a list of ~15+ archival tools on a discussion of Wallabag last month: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14686882 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14686882 Happy to discover yours!
- ernsheong 9y agoHere's one more! https://www.pagedash.com https://www.pagedash.com Launching soon. We use a browser extension to mine your current tab on a click of a button!
- jandrese 9y agoI still have my bookmarks.html file I started building in 1995, but almost everything in it has rotted away. It's a shame too because a lot of the stuff in there would still be useful or interesting, but nobody wants to pay even a nominal fee to keep it online.
- Crontab 9y ago> I often bookmark pages with interesting information to read later, and it inevitably happens once in a while that a site went down and I just can't find the information anymore. I've recently had this problem with some online fiction that I had bookmarked. Now, I was able to recover thanks to the Wayback Machine, but I really shouldn't depend on that. I should really put some thought into archiving pages I like or getting a Pinboard account.
- jacquesm 9y agoLinkrot is a real problem. Especially for those sites that disappear before the archive can get to them. On another note, the more dynamic the web becomes the harder it will be to archive so if you think that the 1994 content is a problem wait until you live in 2040 and you want to read some pages from 2017.
- TheAnimus 9y agoTurns out the solution to every stack overflow post will be "JavaScript is required"
- rahiel 9y agoContent from Stack Overflow has higher odds to survive than this, they've uploaded a data dump of all user-contributed data to archive.org: https://archive.org/details/stackexchange https://archive.org/details/stackexchange. It's all plaintext. This is really generous of Stack Exchange and shows they care for the long-term.
- stordoff 9y agoI assume the anonymisation is just on votes? It doesn't seem 100% clear at first glance.
- TazeTSchnitzel 9y agoServer-side rendering please save us.
- mfoy_ 9y agoA similarly really annoying thing is when you find old technet articles, stack overflow questions, or blog posts that seem potentially really useful, but that have broken images, broken links, etc... so the content (possibly extremely useful at the time) is completely useless now. It really stresses the importance of directly quoting / paraphrasing the content you want in your plain text, and not relying on external resources for posterity.
- tonto 9y agoWikipedia also hit pretty hard by link rot, nice thing there at least is that volunteers can try to fix it
- toomuchtodo 9y agoWikipedia is working with the Internet Archive to automate the prevention of link rot.
- jake-low 9y agoFor anyone curious, you can help fix dead reference links on Wikipedia in just a few seconds. If you find a page that has a dead link (or several), click the "View History" tab at the top, then click "Fix Dead Links" to run the InternetArchiveBot on the page. More info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Link_rot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Link_rot
- exikyut 9y agoGenuine question. Why isn't this done automatically? Astronomical (even suspicious) amounts of continuous outgoing bandwidth?
- RugnirViking 9y agoJust speculating but possibly the difficulty of finding a truly dead link. Often they just redirect to a registry asking if you want to buy the domain. but redirects are also present in legitimate pages
- littleweep 9y agoI mean, this isn't all that surprising. Not unlike buying a twenty-year-old visitor's guide to a city and finding that a number of the shops and restaurants have closed, the stadiums have different names, etc.
- jacquesm 9y agoI don't know about that. People tend to think that our society is very well documented but if you look at what is left of old societies it is usually whatever was engraved in stone or if you're lucky what remained on paper. With the internet replacing most or even all of the paper storage in the short term it is true (besides our present day paper not being acid free to last long enough anyway), we are better documented than ever. But in the longer term it may be a huge gaping hole in history. And that's different than cities changing at their regular pace and books becoming less dated. It's like the visitor guide itself is no longer readable and therefore you won't even know what was there in the past.
- notfromhere 9y agoThis is more like discovering streets don't exist or don't go anywhere anymore
- nitwit005 9y agoIn a way it's convenient. The URLs fail instantly. Trying to find things referenced by an old book can be pretty painful.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- DanBC 9y agoBut cool URLs don't change.
- virusduck 9y agoKnoxville! Knoxville! Knoxville!
- peterwwillis 9y agoMan, I really miss FTP. I remember when you would just FTP to the site you were using and grab a binary from their /pub/. Mirrors were plentiful, and FXP could distribute files without needing a shell on a file server.
- acdha 9y agoI don't remember that era working all that well except if you were only talking about personal homepages at a few large universities. FTP was a bit faster at first but the experience of tracing around an unfamiliar directory hierarchy and guessing at naming conventions is not something I get nostalgic about. Also, consider that right-click save as works the vast majority of the time and the exceptions are for content which simply wouldn't be available (e.g. video streams) for direct download due to IP concerns.
- jharger 9y agoThe unfamiliar directory structure was always an issue, but even worse was using ftp on windows, which defaulted the transfer mode to ASCII, so if you forgot to change it, you'd end up with corrupt files most of the time.
- gaius 9y agoI remember when you could just mount \\ftp.microsoft.com\pub as a drive on your PC. Raw, unauthenticated, unencrypted SMB over the public Internet. At least it was read-only share. Good times.
- Sleeep 9y agoI remember Geocities pages would always be trying to read from my floppy drive. People would not realize you had to upload your pictures before other people could see them and just would put D:\pictures\goatse.jpg as the src of the img tag because they didn't really understand the web (not that I blame them.) Of course, the browser had no problem trying to load local images from untrusted code on a remote host, security policies were, uh, extremely permissive at the time. (Of course, there would be plenty of attempting to read from the C:\ drive too, but that didn't make a loud, unexpected sound like reading from the floppy drive did) Simple times.
- interfixus 9y agoI read an internet article from 2017 and none of the stuff worked without access to all sorts of third party scripts and crap.
- wila 9y agoYip, the irony is that the article about this does not even load on my tablet. Perhaps because of ad blocking at dns level, perhaps not, it does paint a picture though. edit: also doesn't load on a desktop here.
- whatever_dude 9y agoI've had a similar problem. In updating my portfolio site recently, I noticed a vast majority of links were dead. Not just live projects published maybe 3 years or more ago (I expect those to die). But also links to articles and mentions from barely one year ago, or links to award sites, and the like. With a site listing projects going back ~15 years, one can imagine how bad things were. I had to end up creating a link component that would automatically link to an archive.org version of the link on every URL if I marked as "dead". It was so prevalent it had to be automated like that. Another reason why I've been contributing $100/year to the Internet Archive for the past 3 years and will continue to do so. They're doing some often unsung but important work.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- LoSboccacc 9y agobeware: robots.txt can retroactively clear archive.org data
- deadalus 9y agoanother reason to use archive.is
- notyourwork 9y agoWhat is the difference between these two?
- snerbles 9y agoarchive.is does not crawl automatically, it must be pointed at a page by a user. While this makes it particularly useful for snapshotting frequently-changed pages, it is not a replacement for the proper Internet Archive.
- dublinben 9y agoperma.cc is another option as well.
- amelius 9y agoSolution: https://ipfs.io https://ipfs.io > The average lifespan of a web page is 100 days. Remember GeoCities? The web doesn't anymore. It's not good enough for the primary medium of our era to be so fragile. > IPFS provides historic versioning (like git) and makes it simple to set up resilient networks for mirroring of data.
- jacquesm 9y ago> Remember GeoCities? The web doesn't anymore. Bad example: http://reocities.com/ http://reocities.com/
- adventured 9y agoMixed example. Only a small fraction of Geocities pages / content have been preserved. Most of it is lost permanently.
- jacquesm 9y agoRather the opposite, a very large fraction of the original pages have been preserved. Many of them were deleted long before by the owners themselves and/or rehosted elsewhere. Original Geocities content is probably the oldest large body of internet content that will be preserved for many years to come and it will look roughly how it looked on Geocities because it wasn't relying on much of anything other than basic HTML and some images.
- orbitur 9y agoFor whatever reason, my site (Hollywood/Academy/4430) disappeared from Geocities before the mass archival happened. I certainly didn't delete it. I search for it once a year, hope springs eternal.
- jacquesm 9y agoAi. I searched a bit for you, as well in the original crawls but to no avail. Most likely there were very few inbound links to that site which meant it wasn't discovered before it got wiped. I was still archiving stuff long after Geocities had officially shut down, for weeks new stuff turned up. 4428 is there, the next one after that is 4460, I suspect that if it had been archived you'd have found it by now. Have you checked Jason Scott's torrent of all things geocities as well?
- garethsprice 9y agoI Bought a Book of Restaurant Recommendations from 1957 and None of them would Serve Me Dinner Any More
- jacobolus 9y agoI bought a book from 1850, and I could still look up all the references in a university library, or even find most of them on Google Book Search.
- garethsprice 9y agoNot all information on the Internet is created equal and not all information needs to be available in perpetuity. "Free $tuff From the Internet" from 23 years ago is closer to a restaurant guide than a book containing literary or academic references. I'd imagine most of the references in an 1850s coupon book or almanac would also be long dead.
- bootsz 9y agoThis. I'm really excited about projects like IPFS but I'm not totally comfortable with the "everything persists forever" philosophy as it stands now. Preventing link rot is a very worthwhile cause, but content creators should have control over what persists and for how long (see: "Right to Be Forgotten").
- kwhitefoot 9y ago> content creators should have control over what persists and for how long (see: "Right to Be Forgotten"). Strange idea. The "Right to Be Forgotten" in EU law refers to personal data not to works that you have published, it is about privacy not copyright. See the Commision's factsheet on the subject: http://ec.europa.eu/justice/data-protection/files/factsheets/factsheet_data_protection_en.pdf http://ec.europa.eu/justice/data-protection/files/factsheets...
- 9y ago
- indescions_2017 9y agoSee also: Best of the Web '94 Awards. Presented at the First International Conference on the World-Wide Web, Geneva, Switzerland, May 1994. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_International_Conference_on_the_World-Wide_Web#Best_of_the_Web_Awards https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_International_Conference... What's cool isn't how fast some of these technologies become obsolete, such as various Java applets and cgi-bin connected webcams. It's the static content that can survive until the end of time. Like Nicolas Pioch's Web Museum. Bienvenue! http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/ http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/
- jerven 9y agoI must say the swiss-prot links from then still work. You are redirected to the uniprot.org website but the links work.
- whipoodle 9y agoMuch of the appeal of software and the internet is that they can change quickly. We would also like them to never change.
- rffn 9y agoLycos and Yahoo are still around. The book really does not have them?
- jackweirdy 9y agoJust because a domain is around doesn't mean it has the same URL structure. It's tricky to change CMS without getting 404s aplenty.
- aidenn0 9y agoThose were both founded in 1994, and the book spent relatively little time discussing the web (much of which still works, according to the article, despite the headline)
- rffn 9y agoMea culpa. I just read the heading and remembered the old times when they told us that Lycos finds everything. The author only briefly mentions Usenet. That was great fun at the time though.
- notahacker 9y agoI have an internet guide from 1995 which describes Usenet and its varying focuses and levels of seriousness in great detail, including an extended section on trolling which concludes memorably by explaining that people that do this "probably have a very small penis (especially the girls)", which could just as easily have been written about Twitter yesterday. Every time I read something about how social media is changing everything, I remember that it pre-dated the web by a decade...
- SubiculumCode 9y agoThe solution to link rot (and to privacy invasion) is to download the internet.
- andai 9y agoCould you please clarify?
- mcraiha 9y agohttp://dilbert.com/strip/1999-06-06 http://dilbert.com/strip/1999-06-06
- SubiculumCode 9y ago1. Download the internets. 2. git the diffs. Privacy comes because if everyone has the internet in their local cache (lol), then external servers can't say what YOU are REALLY looking at.
- kronos29296 9y agoBest of luck trying to scale git. Microsoft took 3 years and they didn't add Office and Windows to it. And they nearly rewrote their own version of git.
- Jtsummers 9y agoIPFS seems to work effectively for storing versions of files. The downside is, as I mentioned in another post, that it's not permanent. Someone has to pin it or it'll disappear. But it doesn't require anything as complicated to use today as trying to modify git to do something it wasn't meant for.
- SubiculumCode 9y agolets stick to concept for now, eh?
- nebabyte 9y ago
- ChrisSD 9y agoRelated to this, I had trouble finding examples of pre 1996 web design. The internet archive has a lot from 1997 onwards. The oldest live examples of sites from that era, that I know of are: http://www.w3.org/History/19921103-hypertext/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html http://www.w3.org/History/19921103-hypertext/hypertext/WWW/T... http://oreilly.com/gnn/gnnhome.html http://oreilly.com/gnn/gnnhome.html http://www.trincoll.edu/zines/tj/tj12.02.93/tjcontents.html http://www.trincoll.edu/zines/tj/tj12.02.93/tjcontents.html The BBC also donated its Networking Club to the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/bbcnc.org.uk-19950301 https://archive.org/details/bbcnc.org.uk-19950301
- lbhnact 9y agoIf you want to go all the way back, UNC still hosts ibiblio.org, which has links to the first website at CERN http://info.cern.ch/ http://info.cern.ch/ and TBL's first page.
- hmhrex 9y agoThat O'Reilly GNN site is beautiful. I miss this simplicity.
- WrtCdEvrydy 9y agoNeed 3MB worth of JQuery and some swooping in animations.
- observation 9y agoIt loaded so fast!
- based2 9y agoarchive.org
- lex_luthor 9y agoyes. was just thinking about that, but archive.org was not around in 9d4 https://web.archive.org/web/*/www.archive.org https://web.archive.org/web/*/www.archive.org
- CharlesDodgson 9y agoI miss the optimism of the early web, when you could create a simple web page, join a web ring and going online was an event. It's richer and deeper now, but the rawness and simpleness of it all was enjoyable and novel.
- 77pt77 9y agoI just miss that it was mainly text and could be used in a terminal without missing much. More content density, better S/N ratio.
- Frondo 9y agoNot specifically directed at you, but sort of directed at you: I wish everyone who pined for the 25-years-ago days of mostly text pages would, instead of pining, just go out there and produce that content they want to see. Instead of pining, start writing. Hosting is cheap or free, browsers still parse simple HTML, there's nothing stopping anyone from creating a return to that simpler form.
- 77pt77 9y agoI don't write on-line content (no blog for example) but if I did I'd test it in (e)links for sure. :)
- mi100hael 9y agoI do and I test my personal website on lynx. Doesn't change the fact that sites like this are under the misguided impression that it's cheaper to ship 2 MB of JavaScript with each request rather than just responding with the fucking 2 KB of article text so they end up looking like: # I Bought a Book About the Internet From 1994 and None of the Links Worked - Motherboard #motherboard Quantcast [p?c1=2&c2=8568956&cv=2.0&cj=1]
- Frondo 9y ago
- bluejellybean 9y agoI have been wanting to find or build a tool that checked if a link was dead before redirecting my browser. If the link turned out dead, just redirect to the appropriate internet archive[0] link. Problem somewhat solved as long as the archive doesn't go bust. https://archive.org/ https://archive.org/
- drewg123 9y ago> [The Rolling Stones] actually streamed a concert on the platform in November of that year, using an online provider named MBone for some reason.. The MBone was not a "provider", it was an IP multicast network. This was the only way to efficiently stream video content to thousands of simultaneous clients before the advent of CDNs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mbone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mbone
- jandrese 9y agoMBone lost its reason to exist when the internet backbone turned out to be much easier to upgrade than the edges. There's not much need to implement a complicated proxy system to save bandwidth on the backbone when almost everybody is constrained by their last mile link. For years I thought TV stations might connect to the MBone to do simulcasts for people on the Internet once broadband became widespread, but the world moved on before it could become a reality. Part of me still thinks this is a missed opportunity but it's too late to cry over it now.
- Symbiote 9y agoMy internship, in 2006, involved working on an IPTV prototype for Philips. I remember working on a multicast server and the set-top-box client -- the server had a DVB-T card, and rebroadcast all the BBC channels over the LAN. Since the stream was always there, changing channel was extremely fast. DVB broadcasts information packets regularly, containing the TV schedule and so on. These were also forwarded over IP, and then cached by the STB. It was neat, but presumably most of the multicast stuff was abandoned not long after I left. Someone else worked on a system to help the user schedule their TV around the broadcast times.
- _joel 9y agoThe problem with using multicast for content delivery is more down to the subscriber end and how ISPs manage their networks. I worked on a (recent) project that uses multicast in the broadcast context at the mezzanine level. When you've got full control of the network, end to end, it works a lot better.
- stesch 9y agoCan't see the article with NoScript. :-)
- kronos29296 9y agoThey should make sites incompatible with NoScript illegal. Back in my days (lol its just 10+ years) they used plain text for Web pages and used javascript like custom animation in presentations. Now only javascript is there with some html sprinkled in between. P.S the rest of it was in Flash though. So no back button for you.
- overcast 9y agoThat's just silly. The dynamic nature of javascript is what caused the explosion of websites around 2007, due to the advent of jQuery. Saying we should all go back to plain text is just being an old grump. Should it be overused? No. Just like GIFs shouldn't have been overused on Geocities.
- CaptSpify 9y agoI generally agree with you but... > The dynamic nature of javascript is what caused the explosion of websites around 2007, due to the advent of jQuery. I'm not convinced that was a good thing. Pretty much all of that content is terrible. Quality > Quantity
- panglott 9y ago"It was possible to get on a text-based version of the internet for free in many areas, using only a modem and a phone line. An entire section of Free $tuff From the Internet offers up a lengthy list of free-nets, grassroots phone systems that essentially allowed for free access to text-based online resources." Makes me want to try to read a Markdown-only Internet browser, which treats native Markdown documents as the only kind of Web page.
- kronos29296 9y agoYou would have to give up all the dynamic convienience we take for granted. Menus would be just links. Basically you would have HN like sites for the small ones and the big ones would have images. That's it. On second thought that wouldn't be so bad considering the bloat we have to deal with nowadays. (1 MB per page for just news from sites like CNN ugh.)
- aendruk 9y agoI long for the day that browsers and search engines support RFC 7763.
- anigbrowl 9y agoYeah I'm afraid to try this with my book which came out around the same time XD
- jedberg 9y agoI owned (and still do own) this book! I would spend many hours as a teenager going through the links and accessing all the cool stuff in the book. This really brings back memories! And yes, the way I got on the internet in those days was to dial into a public Sprintlink number, then telnet to a card catalog terminal in the Stanford library, and then send the telnet "Break" command at exactly the right time to break out of the card catalog program and have unfettered internet access. Good times.
- sogen 9y agoAhh telnet, good times, I miss that web...
- cestith 9y agoI was lucky. A public library had a dial-in account with lynx as the shell and the card catalog an inter-library loan systems served as web pages. I just had to hit 'g' and type in any URL, including Gopher, WAIS, Archie, or telnet ones. This left me no great way by itself to get things downloaded locally, but I could telnet into a shell elsewhere, download things to there, and feed them back via zmodem through the telnet and the dialup. That was before I had a local PPP provider, of course.
- belak 9y agoThis reminds me of the Final Fantasy IX strategy guide. It integrated with Square Enix's Play Online service but now that FFIX was removed from Play Online, none of the links work any more and the guide is pretty much useless. I'm sure we'll start to see more of this in the coming years. It's not really sustainable to keep a website running forever.
- jandrese 9y agoIf the service is still running then the added cost of hosting legacy content is near zero. Assuming the site wasn't full of bandwidth hogging live video or anything like that the cost of storage and hosting are almost zero. Keeping a whole server running however does get a bit more expensive, but you could also rehost it on a cloud provider for a very modest cost per month.
- j45 9y agoI run into this a lot and use diigo.com to cache the sites I visit to ensure anything I found useful enough to bookmark continues to exist in my life.
- neoCrimeLabs 9y agoSomewhat Unrelated. I noticed that the wayback machine no longer lists historical sites if the latest/last revision of robots.txt denies access. Has anyone else experienced this? In the late-90's I helped build one of the first fortune-500 e-commerce web sites. The website was shutdown years ago, but it view viewable on the wayback machine as recently as a year ago. The company in question put a deny-all robots.txt on the domain, and now none of the history is viewable. It's a shame -- used to use that website (and an easteregg with my name on it) as proof of experience.
- biofox 9y agoApplying denials retroactively makes no sense whatsoever -- it defeats the whole point of archiving. Do you know if archive.org still has a copy?
- komali2 9y agoThe article indicates that the "free" stuff on the internet was hidden away in weird places - ftp servers and the like. No google to find it for you, the only way was by word of mouth, or I guess via published book. Answers a question I always had about "Snow Crash" by Neal Stephenson. The main character, Hiro Protagonist (I still giggle at that name), sometimes did work as a kind of data wrangler - "gathering intel and selling it to the CIC, the for-profit organization that evolved from the CIA's merger with the Library of Congress" (Wikipedia). I always wondered what made that feasible as a sort of profit model, and I guess now I know - that was the state of the internet in 1992, when the book was published. Seems like a way cooler time period for Cyberpunk stuff, I'm almost sad I missed it :(
- epc 9y agoWe did have search engines, just not as fast or encompassing as Google. Archie came online in 1990 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archie_search_engine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archie_search_engine ). Jughead and Veronica followed ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jughead_(search_engine) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jughead_(search_engine) , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veronica_(search_engine) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veronica_(search_engine) ). More often than not a search started with a Usenet newsgroup FAQ.
- cestith 9y agoDon't forget we had Gopher and WAIS before the Web, too.
- mmagin 9y agoOf course, still, finding the good stuff, rather than whatever has been SEO'd in the google listings is difficult in some subjects.
- ashwn 9y agoLOL the link to Vice didn't even work for me.
- ElectricPenguin 9y agoThe AOL disk in the back of the book doesn't work either.
- vhost- 9y agoI've been an arch linux user for a very long time. I very much praise the documentation and it always gets me 90% of the way there when trying to solve a problem or configure something. But when I need that extra 10% I can usually find someone on the forums with a similar issue and the solution is usually a huge rabbit hole of links and some are broken, which gets really frustrating because I have to hope that it was cached by archive.org.
- aorth 9y agoI can't even find my own tweets sometimes. We're so screwed.
- pc2g4d 9y agoThis problem has concerned me for some time. One solution would be for websites to declare their license (Creative Commons, proprietary, public domain, etc.) and then web pages can embed the content of pages linked to when the license allows it. A web with content-based addressing and versioning built into the protocol could also deal with this situation more gracefully, but again there are copyright issues.
- Havoc 9y agoYup. Recently promised a colleague a pdf. I knew what I was looking for, who wrote it and and which site it was on (regional site of my employer). It even featured highly on google (showed up on related searches). Zilch. Nada...couldn't find it anymore. Gone. Something I had easily chanced upon before I know couldn't find with directed searching. They must have restructured their site.
- dep_b 9y agoJust yesterday I was helping an uncle changing the Flash-based menu of his site about classic race cars to a newer one so it would actually show on phones. It was all .htm files that included the Flash menu every time, apparently he worked with some kind of 15-year old copy of Dreamweaver that would add it to the top of every page he created like a template. I could have switched it to a PHP include but that would either break all existing links, take a bit of work to make .htm files execute PHP or to make them forward permanently to their PHP versions. Or I simply could do the only sane thing: loading menu.php on every page within an IFRAME and changing his 15 years old Dreamweaver template. The internet has been saved! A bit at least!
- handedness 9y agoAny chance you can point us to the site? Sounds fun.
- dep_b 9y agoWell alright: http://www.cupecitas.com.ar http://www.cupecitas.com.ar It hasn't been updated yet though!
- handedness 9y agoFun throwback. Thanks.
- dep_b 9y agoWell throwback....it's updated weekly!
- handedness 9y agoOh sure, the updates are current, but the feel of the site itself and the fun vehicles depicted are quite retro! (And satisfyingly so, I should add.)
- memracom 9y agoDid you try looking them up at archive.org? I expect that many of them will work there. The web is ephemeral unless somebody archives it. Many companies offer an archive service for your sites for a fee, and archive.org does it to provide a historical record,
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- JepZ 9y agoWell yeah, it sucks. I think the problem here is, that an URL was supposed to be a stable, unique identifier for a ressource (like a UUID). But at the same time humans have to enter them and therefore they have to be nice, shiny and up to date with the latest trends, which causes them to change constantly... Maybe we should built a DHT containing UUIDs for all pages als alternative, stable URIs :D
- sjclemmy 9y agoI've got a book about javascript from 1995. It mentions closure once and says something like "... but you'll never need to use that feature of the language." How I laughed.
- JustSomeNobody 9y agoNever say "Never" or "Always".
- sjclemmy 9y agoOk, it was 96 or 97. But the point still stands.
- gigavinyl 9y agoI know this is sort of side-stepping the issue but isn't this what the Wayback Machine is for?
- kazishariar 9y agoWhatever happened to Project Xanadu? Wasn't that 'apposed to address these?
- umanwizard 9y agoMy uncle Pat wrote this book (and multiple others in the same series). I'm amazed Vice is talking about it over twenty years later and I'm sure he will be too once I show him the link! I had lots of fun reading them as an Internet-addicted kid -- but several of the links were dead even before it was officially published.
- glangdale 9y agoThe reason the book didn't mention spam all that much is that it was from 1994 and probably mostly (or entirely) written before April 12, 1994, which is when the infamous "immigration lawyer spam" hit every newsgroup. It wasn't the first spam, obviously, but it did seem to mark a line where spam (USENET and email) became more and more prevalent.
- twic 9y ago> The Rolling Stones [...] actually streamed a concert on the platform in November of that year, using an online provider named MBone for some reason "For some reason"! That's the flipping multicast backbone you're talking about there! One of the great lost dreams of the internet! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mbone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mbone
- RJIb8RBYxzAMX9u 9y agoI don't think this is necessarily a bad thing. For one, the 80/20 rule applied back then just as it does today, so most of what's lost is crap to begin with. It's no different than in the real world: surely nobody's lamenting that you can't pick up a copy of Fordyce's Sermons anymore (and I presume that it'd be long forgotten if not for Austen). While some valuable resources were undoubtedly lost, most live on re-posted elsewhere, like memes, but in a "good" way. Secondly, the book is more analogous to a map or dictionary, and it ought to be a descriptive source, not a prescriptive one. Some language purists may disagree, but I could care less :-). And similar to an old, outdated, map, you'd expect that the details may have changed, but the landmarks are most likely still accurate. NASA's still nasa.gov, MIT's still mit.edu -- well, IIRC www.mit.edu used to point to their library's portal, and web.mit.edu their main page; I see that's changed -- and CompuServ still...exists.
- basicplus2 9y agoI think it should be considered best practice to not only provide links but host a copy of what you are linking to.
- joannaz 9y agoThis is why projects to do with Internet archiving such as https://archain.org/ https://archain.org/ interest me, as imagine all of the dead links and data lost 23 years from now!
- ernsheong 9y agoI'm working on https://www.pagedash.com https://www.pagedash.com, sort of a personal web archive. Hope it helps people like journalists or authors to keep links alive with their original content, even if the original website goes down.
- nebabyte 9y agoSounds like pinboard.io
- ernsheong 9y agoDifference is that PageDash can archive pages that require authentication because it uses a browser extension to retrieve page assets (it doesn't just delegate the work to a server to do the crawling). It also can grab stuff within iframes. Basically the main feature is "archive the page exactly as you saw it".
- rand005 9y agoYou probably meant pinboard.in
- usaphp 9y agoWell if you purchase a yellow book from 1994 I doubt you will find many businesses listed there to still exist and show correct phone numbers...
- paulddraper 9y ago??? Huh ??? You think most businesses are less than 24 years old? Or do you think businesses change phone numbers every few years?
- hayksaakian 9y agoMost businesses fail within the first few years. 24 years later much would have changed.
- debJC 9y agoThank god for Archive.org This was my first professional website (19yrs ago!) for the largest Banking Agency and holding company at the time: DOREMUS https://web.archive.org/web/19980204230930/http://www.doremus.com:80/wsn/ https://web.archive.org/web/19980204230930/http://www.doremu... DAS https://web.archive.org/web/19981203013454/http://www.dasglobal.com:80/main.html https://web.archive.org/web/19981203013454/http://www.dasglo... Sadly my 1st Print Interactive Award for best Shockwave site requires a plugin: https://web.archive.org/web/19990429113419/http://www.eyeballonthefloor.com:80/ https://web.archive.org/web/19990429113419/http://www.eyebal...
- free2buandme 9y agohttps://archive.org/web/ https://archive.org/web/
- toptalkedbooks 9y agoI curious why you did that, but you did a nice job.
- INTPenis 9y agoWhere did you live in 1994? Who lives there now? Is the building still standing? I'm sure I'd get mixed answers to that and that's still the physical world, not the virtual one where "buildings" can come and go at the press of a button.
- aaron695 9y agoFor millions of years 'people' did or made cool things. There must be billions+ of artistic objects and acts lost from the past. Does it matter if they ALL don't make it? (I wish a lot more did, but ALL?) In fact their loss adds value in many ways, if Woodstock was exactly the same year in year out would it have been as special to those who went.
- meerita 9y agoI have tons of books from 1990-2002. I have to recover those CDs that came with magazines, those CDs have mirrored websites, almost entirely.
- jaclaz 9y agoJust in case there is an interesting resource here: http://cd.textfiles.com/ http://cd.textfiles.com/ they are essentially "shareware" CD's of the early '90's, but some are more or less "snapshots" of what was available on the web, check this one as an example: The Internet Info CDROM From Walnut Creek (July 1994) http://cd.textfiles.com/internetinfo http://cd.textfiles.com/internetinfo http://cd.textfiles.com/internetinfo/index.txt http://cd.textfiles.com/internetinfo/index.txt
- livrem 9y agoI have used the Firefox ScrapBook extension for over 10 years. It saves a static dump of the DOM of the page you are looking at (and all images) so it does not depend on anything external to show the page and you can save pages that required a login or was generated by any amount of complex javascripts. Also saves a link to the original site and comes with features to edit pages and join them (those annoying articles spread out over multiple pages to show more ads) and more. There is a clone of it for Chrome as well that I have not tried.
- a-dub 9y agohttps://web.archive.org/web/19961220034419/http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/SDG/Software/Mosaic/NCSAMosaicHome.html https://web.archive.org/web/19961220034419/http://www.ncsa.u...