
The Internet Archive and Jason Scott are saving our weird Internet history - whyleyc
https://blog.zamzar.com/2020/01/27/jason-scott/
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textfiles
What a lot of people think of as "Jason Scott" is the result of hundreds of
people working at/with the Internet Archive, hundreds more volunteering effort
and resources at Archive Team, and dozens of great contributors to the
stacks/collections of TEXTFILES.COM.

I am a very pretty and flamboyant figure standing at the front of a literal
army of real contributors to taking online history seriously and making it
both available and accessible to future generations.

~~~
badsectoracula
Thanks for your work, i only have the ability to donate to a very few
projects, but the Internet Archive is always one of them. Computers would be a
lot more boring to me without it.

~~~
jonah-archive
Thank you for your donations! We do our absolute best to put them to the most
effective use we can.

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derekp7
There is a certain weirdness that still can't be captured in a static archive,
including sites that had dynamic server based content. But also the overall
feeling of the internet back then. For example, pre-web I recall being able to
telnet to a CD store and do a search, then place an order. The telnet
interface acted a lot like a BBS.

Then there is the shared cultural knowledge at the time, such as Adam Curry (I
think?) who on his own created MTV.com. Then later got sued and had to had the
domain over when they realized there was value to it. On top of that, there
was one of the first spoof pages I recall, "Madam Furry", which poked fun at
Adam Curry's page. (Hopefully I'm remembering all these names correctly).

And lets not forget about Gopher, with Veronica and Archie, along with
something else called WAIS (Wide Area Information Services), which always seem
very slow and barely workable.

Oh, and how did we figure out the who/what/where? The Internet Yellow Pages,
of course. Thick book that had everything categorized. I've still got mine
around, brought it into work to put in the commons area book shelf.

~~~
kragen
The mtv.com thing is correct. He was working for MTV at the time, then left
and kept building the web pages. There wasn't then a precedent about domain
names being connected to trademarks. I don't remember Madam Furry.

WAIS has an interesting connection to the Internet Archive.

Long before the Internet Yellow Pages, we used Scott Yanoff's Internet
services list. That's how I found out about the WWW. Also there was a big list
of sites that allowed anonymous FTP.

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squarefoot
The Internet Archive is one of the two projects along with Wikipedia that when
possible I try to help with some quid, so I was about to donate one more time,
but alas their Paypal donation page stopped working months ago. It just
displays a darker page with the Paypal logo in the middle and stays there
doing nothing. All adblockers already disabled of course.

~~~
cxr
Wikimedia is a lot like Mozilla. Neither is really hurting for cash.

~~~
bn7t
It's still important to donate to them so they can stay independent.

Say Wikimedia would become dependent on the donations of a company, that
company could technically force them to publish misleading information.

In regards to mozilla they are currently not financially independent.

Most of their money comes from google (in exchange google is the default
search engine).

~~~
cxr
"Dependent" suggests a necessity is being fulfilled, and that's the point of
my comment. We're past necessity. Both Mozilla and Wikimedia are already
bringing in several times over the amount of cash they need to operate.

~~~
zozbot234
AIUI, both organizations have plenty of worthwhile projects which are
constrained by available funding. They're not just maintaining a web browser +
hosting an encyclopedia.

Of course, this is not to say that funding the Archive isn't also important.

~~~
cxr
> both organizations have plenty of worthwhile projects

Yes of course.

But both projects' biggest constraints are not (lack of) funding. It's bad
mismanagement, or in the case of Mozilla, _really_ bad mismanagement.

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joe_the_user
It would be nice to see them save all the weird content available, or even all
the weird content they quite plausibly have a legal right to save.

IE, this is as good a place as any to once again complain about ways that a
significant amount of stuff enters a memory hole AFTER being put int to the
internet archive (example ezboard.com but I think that's just an example[1]).

Basically, archive pulls content when a _later_ robots.txt file says don't
archive (the robots.txt file of the domain parker after the actual website
closed, generally). Broadly, their approach seems like "anyone, anywhere who
even implicitly claims copyright on X can knock it and anything related X off
archive _forever_. [1]

And the last time I discussed this here, the policy itself had supposedly been
updated but ezboard content in particular (the example in the link and
something I'm interested in), still wasn't available.

[1] [https://archive.org/post/389129/why-is-archived-content-
purg...](https://archive.org/post/389129/why-is-archived-content-purged-
retroactively-was-re-ezboard-content-suddenly-not-available-in-the)

~~~
brokensegue
My understanding is that the archived content is hidden but remains archived
despite the robots file. Presumably for later historical/scientific work

~~~
joe_the_user
Sure, I hope so, but the chilling to the free availability of information
remains.

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lilSebastian
Worthy of donation [https://archive.org/donate/](https://archive.org/donate/)

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thom
I've always felt a bit sad that my earliest forays into the web on Demon and
CIX aren't fully captured here. You are all lucky whipper-snappers who have
their youthful exuberance archived for when you're old and boring.

~~~
anigbrowl
Oh snap, nto too many CIXen still around. I came across some of my usenet
comments from around then last year which was amusing and horrifying in equal
measure.

~~~
thom
I feel the same, although in a sense it was an early taste of the probably-
inevitable privacy landscape that faces our kids, and has allowed me to
embrace that with slightly less panic.

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ValentineC
If you buy a lot from Amazon, you can choose Internet Archive as your
supported charity for AmazonSmile.

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generationP
Archive Encyclopedia Dramatica and then you can brag about weird history.

~~~
sp332
[https://archive.org/search.php?query=encyclopedia%20dramatic...](https://archive.org/search.php?query=encyclopedia%20dramatica)
123 results - and yeah some of them are weird.

Edit: and yeah you can browse it in the Wayback Machine
[https://web.archive.org/web/20200113163734/https://encyclope...](https://web.archive.org/web/20200113163734/https://encyclopediadramatica.se/Main_Page)
which has more frequent updates, but I don't think they're as thorough which
means the inter-page links might go to versions from different dates. The dump
files have a better chance of being good snapshots.

~~~
generationP
Hah, as 5GB large XML files... still, glad that it's there!

