> I have pretty much everything I care about from the past 20 years or so but a lot of it would be effectively gone had I not specifically saved it. While you

> I have pretty much everything I care about from the past 20 years or so but a lot of it would be effectively gone had I not specifically saved it. While you have it - for "us" it is "effectively gone" - unless you uploaded it somewhere. In the future, after you die, it may become "absolutely gone" - as your relatives or whomever likely won't care, and will discard it. Unless you make some effort to preserve it. Most people don't - they never did; it was always left up to future people to do so. For instance, my mom and dad saved a ton of old photos and letters between them, many while he was in the service during the Vietnam War. My mom saved them - but not in a great way. She basically put them all in a box, then that inside a trash bag, and we found it in my old childhood home after both she and my had passed away. So I saved them. But - unless I scan them - they will be gone forever. In a sense, though, that's ok - because they were never meant to be public anyhow. But for stuff on the internet - it was public; it was most likely meant to be public. But if you save it personally, then the site or whatever goes away, what the public had is gone. Things like that didn't really happen in the past - I mean, they did - but there was always the possibility of recovery in the future. More than a few times was something thought "lost forever" - only to be recovered; it found hidden away somewhere, or buried in some dusty archive in a back room of a basement storage area at a university or something. Sometimes found inside a wall. But the digital? That is rare indeed. Even precious artifacts like tapes and manuals from times past get thrown out all the time, usually by relatives of some passed on engineer, often by their widows, as "so much of this old junk". Occasionally, though, it gets saved (usually by bitsavers) - and if we are really lucky, it gets scanned or pulled from the tapes - old archives of code, sometimes of other stuff... But we lose more than we save. I'm just rambling now - this kind of thing, this loss of our computing history in general (it's more than just "the early internet" - we've lost and thrown away so much of our "early computing" history, it's not funny)... Think about the inventions that have changed humanity in radical ways, that have altered our society greatly: The steam engine, the automobile, the airplane, etc. How many museums and such are there that celebrate, archive, and curate information about them? The computer? How many museums are there for it in comparison? The difference is stark. A thought I just now had is that I wonder if it is like this, because the computer represents such a different "threat" to humans - that is, it's the closest we've come to a representation of "us" - our minds. And - as it becomes more tightly integrated into our society, if not our body collective (and literal) - if we unconsciously seek to marginalize it due to fear in some manner; fear of the other? fear of the artificial? fear of the usurper? Maybe we seek to forget what we have wrought?