I could go on and on about this myself but consider this one... 200 years from now, if you wanted to view family photos from the past your ancestors would have to have passed them down electronically from system to system, file format converted for all of that time. It's like each generation will have to have a "family archivist" role. Maybe paper photos will survive longer, but it will be clear that there are few paper photos after 2000 or so, when electronic photos became the norm.
Archive.org, bitsavers.org, etc will all have to be converted too. I say take it upon yourself to preserve whatever it is you deem worthy and make a plan and prepare for how it will be maintained after you're gone. Family, computer, documents, whatever. Don't rely on someone else to do it for you. All of the riches in the world did not prevent (and may have actually caused) the dilemma the LCM is in now. I am sure a lot of it will be saved and probably most will be preserved but not all. And that's basically how it is, history fades away, even the big things. It takes a lot of foresight and teaching the young folks about the importance of learning from the past. I don't know about you, but there aren't too many others in my family who care about computer history...I wonder if any of what I have preserved will be around even 100 years from now. Bill On Sat, Nov 20, 2021 at 7:56 AM Bill Gunshannon via cctalk < cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote: > On 11/19/21 9:33 PM, Steve Malikoff via cctalk wrote: > > Michael asked > >> What are we, as a community, to do to fix this and make sure that our > >> history stays peserved and isn't one bad day away from vanishing. > > > > Whenever some new vintage computing page appears I go to archive.org > and submit the > > URL to them for the wayback machine. Often they've crawled it already, > but not always > > so I think it does help. > > > > And what happens when you wake up one morning to find archive.org is > gone, too? > > I remember hearing how the web was going to make everything perpetual. > And yet the list of things that have disappeared just gets longer and > longer. > > bill > >
