Why there is so little left of the early internet (BBC)

Very interesting.
One of my other interest is collecting old Mac laptops, restoring them, trying to make and use old systems on it…
The thing is, a lot of the infos, tips, and howto about soft/hardware are on forums posts dating back from the early 2000s sometime. When the forum that old is gone, even an Internet Archive page of is rarely complete.

Funny how the cultural mediums (is that correct english?) have gone from rare but quite durable (books, paintings…), to so plentiful and almost as ephemeral as a hard drive life span.

If the Internet Archive close one day…
 
It was the same thing with the Warship Projects 3.0 board, once it went down, everything was lost as the internet archive didn't save the threads. Which is one of the reasons I created the 'Fictional Warships' thread on this forum and Hood created his equivalent thread on Shipbucket.
 
Remember shareware and sites that had the latest and greatest each day? Don't see those anymore either. Remember when an animated GIF on a website was cutting edge? Or a website counter.
 
http://www.pmview.com/spaceodysseytwo/spacelvs/

Vintage 1995 - 2001 although Lindroos actually had to rebuild the website ten years ago, when it went offline. I spent many hours there in 2002-2003 filling my brain with Shuttle pre-history, 1969-72 era. Still have the copies of the site I downloaded on floppy disks, one page, one floppy disk, rinse, repeat...
 
Very often the Internet Archive has saved the main page but for larger forum sites of course it could never capture all the content.
For some smaller sites though its done quite well. I don't think we ever recovered when the geocities sites went, there was so much interesting content that was lost.
The loss of Warship Projects was a blow. It tried to come back to life as a tag-on with World of Warships but was swamped by gamer players. Also, several of the contributors have now passed on and much of the material there has been lost (though some has found its way here, other bits to other blogs and sites like All the World's Battlecriusers).
 
So much for the uber-optimistic/pessimistic prognostication that "the internet never forgets";)...

Martin
 

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