Subj : Resurgence of non-mainstr
To : Kaelon
From : Boraxman
Date : Tue May 03 2022 06:34 pm
-=> Kaelon wrote to Boraxman <=-
> The best was simple web pages set up by people who knew their subject, and
> put their findings on the Internet for posterity. They too are harder to
> find, but you come accross them from time to time. Simple HTML pages, some
> inline images, thats it. I save webpages that are good references to an
> archive hard disk, incase I need it later and the site or page dissapears.
Ka> I love this practice, and genuinely, wish I would adopt it more often
Ka> myself. Of course, the loss of Geocities was tremendous because
Ka> virtually all of those sites were filled with really interesting
Ka> information from amateurs and professionals alike. True subject matter
Ka> experts are passionate and know their topics really well, and when you
Ka> see them provide insight, it's a joy to read and review.
Ka> Re: your later statement about what will stand the test of time, as
Ka> much as I like to think that a digital archive will be the enduring
Ka> trove of our lifetimes, I am genuinely worried that the continuing
Ka> obsolescence of media, operating systems, and formats will lead to a
Ka> great Dark Age of knowledge, when computers of the future won't be able
Ka> to read the files from today, let alone the 1980s or 1990s.
Ka> People keep insisting that the best way to preserve knowledge is to
Ka> print it out. I'm just glad that I never became a true digital native,
Ka> despite having been raised in the 1980s and 1990s and growing up around
Ka> systems. I always print pretty much everything; it's how my brain
Ka> works! _____
I did have a Geocities page. Like most people, the page was amateurish, and
heavily personalised. Created from scratch the way that I envisioned the web
page to look, not based on a template. There are still such sites, though they
are lost amongst the noise.
A suspect a lot of sites now are AI generated, designed to game Google's
algorithms and bring in that sweet, sweet ad revenue.
There was an effort in the 80's to digitise the Domesday book. A decade and a
bit later, the original Domesday book can still be read, but the digital
version not so, because of changes in technology and obsolescence. In the
future, the difficulty will be finding it. We will have a similar problem to
what scholars in the middle ages had, when books weren't categorised or logged,
but where just put in piles, poorly titled, and one had to go through them all
to find information, or even just to determine what they were about.
I still have some data from the 90s and 2000's, but most people I would wager,
don't, and if they do, it is lost, obscure, opaque. Look at all the BBS's that
existed in the 80's and 90's, how many of those are now lost forever?
