On: Why there’s so little left of the early internet

[tibbon]

I'm imagining Jason Scott/textfiles on an Indiana Jones-like mission, where he finds a hard drive containing all of this, but then has to run to escape, including running from a boulder and jumping over snakes.

[0815test → tibbon]

The reality is not far from this - AIUI, the Internet Archive does have a fairly sizable archive of very early Usenet that was extracted from backup tapes stored at a random zoology department somewhere in Canada. So dangerous snakes were very likely involved, at least.

[DonHopkins → 0815test]

A random zoology department somewhere in Canada??!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Spencer

That's like saying seismo was a random nuclear warhead detonation monitoring facility somewhere in Northern Virginia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rick_Adams_(Internet_pioneer)

If utzoo was involved, then they probably mounted a scratch monkey, at least.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scratch_monkey

https://edp.org/monkey.htm

[ghaff → 0815test]

Here's the story: https://www.salon.com/2002/01/08/saving_usenet/

One of the interesting points the story brings up is that you never know what future people will care about. In this case cultural and political discussions are typically more interesting than arcana about bug fixes in long ago systems.

[EamonnMR → 0815test]

Is it hosted anywhere, or just in a vault?

[textfiles → tibbon]

WAS I CALLED

[spc476 → textfiles]

I wonder if we could get Kibo to show up.