4 ms·

Pointed question, but why do we need to preserve it? And who decides what we need to preserve?

steponlego 4y ago
You've never heard of John Titor? In all seriousness while you don't have to believe in time travelers, there is a lesson to be learned there. Look what happened to the Digital Domesday Project. If preservation efforts had begun earlier it might all be online now.
SllX 4y ago
I’ll answer the who: people with money, capital and time choosing on their own what to spend their money, capital and time on to the degree to which they can sustain to do so.
VonGuard 4y ago
Because this stuff is an important part of our cultural, artistic and scientific heritage. We do not get to decide what the future finds interesting. Therefore, we must preserve as much as we possibly can so that those in the future have the ability to pick and choose. As it stands now, a lot of human history is just pieced together from trash and rubble. You can go to Rembrandt's house in Amsterdam, visit where he painted, slept, ate, taught, and stored his junk. You can see how he worked, where he worked, what the lighting was like in his house, what the door looked like then and now. Atari, on the other hand, is just gone. We cannot see their offices (they've been reoccupied a lot), and we have very little in the way of assets generated from the creation process back then. It is currently easier for us to see how Rembrandt worked 500 years ago than it is to see how Atari employees worked 40 years ago. That's not a good state of affairs, considering how influential Atari was on the evolution of home gaming.
- ghaff 4y ago
  A great deal of information about computer systems and such from even fairly important computer companies more than 20 years old is pretty much lost forever. I was actually trying to reconstruct some details about one of the minicomputer companies that was purchased in 1999. There's very little left online outside of a Wikipedia article and information about individual systems pretty much doesn't exist any longer. Does that really matter? Dunno.
- tablespoon 4y ago
  > We do not get to decide what the future finds interesting. That's factually wrong. If you decide to utterly obliterate something, the future can't find it interesting. > Therefore, we must preserve as much as we possibly can so that those in the future have the ability to pick and choose. As it stands now, a lot of human history is just pieced together from trash and rubble. That's a value judgement that will eventually succumb to its own contradictions. Preserving stuff, especially preserving "as much as we possibly can" is a luxury that many ages can't afford. It's all going to end up as "trash and rubble" eventually. If you want make something to survive for the long term, make trash and rubble.
  - tenebrisalietum 4y ago
    > That's factually wrong. If you decide to utterly obliterate something, the future can't find it interesting. Object X may be deleted but did you make sure all references to X were deleted as well? The future may become interested in something it suspects did exist, but no longer does. Unlike a programming language, humanity may try to reconstruct the missing X.
    - tablespoon 4y ago
      >> That's factually wrong. If you decide to utterly obliterate something, the future can't find it interesting. > Object X may be deleted but did you make sure all references to X were deleted as well? IMHO, something with references to it isn't utterly obliterated. But there are a lot of things with little-to-no references to them, and those are things someone can totally decide to make the future uninterested in.
teawrecks 4y ago
I feel like Paul Allen himself answered this question as well as anyone could in his letter shown in the article.

You've never heard of John Titor? In all seriousness while you don't have to believe in time travelers, there is a lesson to be learned there. Look what happened to the Digital Domesday Project. If preservation efforts had begun earlier it might all be online now.

SllX 4y ago

I’ll answer the who: people with money, capital and time choosing on their own what to spend their money, capital and time on to the degree to which they can sustain to do so.

VonGuard 4y ago

Because this stuff is an important part of our cultural, artistic and scientific heritage. We do not get to decide what the future finds interesting. Therefore, we must preserve as much as we possibly can so that those in the future have the ability to pick and choose. As it stands now, a lot of human history is just pieced together from trash and rubble. You can go to Rembrandt's house in Amsterdam, visit where he painted, slept, ate, taught, and stored his junk. You can see how he worked, where he worked, what the lighting was like in his house, what the door looked like then and now. Atari, on the other hand, is just gone. We cannot see their offices (they've been reoccupied a lot), and we have very little in the way of assets generated from the creation process back then. It is currently easier for us to see how Rembrandt worked 500 years ago than it is to see how Atari employees worked 40 years ago. That's not a good state of affairs, considering how influential Atari was on the evolution of home gaming.

ghaff 4y ago
A great deal of information about computer systems and such from even fairly important computer companies more than 20 years old is pretty much lost forever. I was actually trying to reconstruct some details about one of the minicomputer companies that was purchased in 1999. There's very little left online outside of a Wikipedia article and information about individual systems pretty much doesn't exist any longer. Does that really matter? Dunno.
tablespoon 4y ago
> We do not get to decide what the future finds interesting. That's factually wrong. If you decide to utterly obliterate something, the future can't find it interesting. > Therefore, we must preserve as much as we possibly can so that those in the future have the ability to pick and choose. As it stands now, a lot of human history is just pieced together from trash and rubble. That's a value judgement that will eventually succumb to its own contradictions. Preserving stuff, especially preserving "as much as we possibly can" is a luxury that many ages can't afford. It's all going to end up as "trash and rubble" eventually. If you want make something to survive for the long term, make trash and rubble.
- tenebrisalietum 4y ago
  > That's factually wrong. If you decide to utterly obliterate something, the future can't find it interesting. Object X may be deleted but did you make sure all references to X were deleted as well? The future may become interested in something it suspects did exist, but no longer does. Unlike a programming language, humanity may try to reconstruct the missing X.
  - tablespoon 4y ago
    >> That's factually wrong. If you decide to utterly obliterate something, the future can't find it interesting. > Object X may be deleted but did you make sure all references to X were deleted as well? IMHO, something with references to it isn't utterly obliterated. But there are a lot of things with little-to-no references to them, and those are things someone can totally decide to make the future uninterested in.

teawrecks 4y ago

I feel like Paul Allen himself answered this question as well as anyone could in his letter shown in the article.