

Where Online Services Go When They Die - vipshek
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/07/where-online-services-go-when-they-die/374099/

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ericclemmons
Prodigy is what got me into programming. While trying to find something to do
online, I came across their message boards for game programming.

I vividly remember following directions and downloading files to play a game
someone else uploaded for QBasic. The first page of code were nothing but
comments, so I naively assumed that computers could just "understand" prose
and display it on screen.

The message boards were extremely helpful (where Red Baron was released!), and
even had gurus who wrapped their names with tildes to distinguish themselves.

~Eric~

~~~
snide
It got me into computers as well. I vividly remember checking their message
boards on my IBM PS1 to get me through King's Quest VI back in the day. More
importantly, I was able to find information on how to navigate DOS so I could
free up the 20 megs of Hard Drive space I needed to play it.

~~~
pjbrunet
You didn't have a DOS manual?

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keithpeter
_" As we invest more of our lives into the electronic realm, corporate
decisions to shut down online services without recourse are beginning to
resemble digital acts of Nero burning Rome—cultural history and entire
communities are trashed in the process."_

The OA was aged 11 to 18 while using Prodigy. Recent work on memory tends to
suggest that particular age range, perhaps up to early 20s, leaves very strong
memories - many things are new &c. So this aspect of OAs life has a lot of
importance to the OA.

In the area I live in, we have, in the last 30 years or so, demolished huge
factories and whole vertically integrated industries have vanished or moved
south to lower wage countries. Foundaries, lock factories, tool making, car
making. Those factories were the site of communities - you spend half your
waking lives at work - but they were demolished as quick as anything. Some
history survives but not the detail/experience.

If anything, digital communities are _easier_ to preserve in the sense that
the whole corpus can be captured. Please note I said easier, not easy!

~~~
Einstalbert
Good point on that last part. It's amazing that EzBoards exist in this day in
age, in any form, but we've yet to figure out an easy way to gobble things up;
I can get my own wikipedia site started in under 10 minutes but I can't get an
easy way to archive a bunch of stuff online? It'd be a service for sure, but
storage is cheap these days.

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shopinterest
The issue even back then, was data portability. We should do this not only for
selfish reasons, but for capturing our history, our discussions and knowledge
sources that don't exist anywhere else for history. A small example, tonight I
wanted to revisit my comments at the 2010 World Cup that I did at Television
Without Pity 4 years ago - But NBCUniversal decided to shut down the site and
kept the recaps, but killed the forums, and over 10+ years of TV discussion is
lost. So I bet we'd like peeps from the year 2064 to be able to see our
Facebook pages to at least understand some of our day-to-day lives for
historical reference. Will it be there?

~~~
pjbrunet
This is why self-hosted WordPress is cool. If you have something important to
say, do it on your own domain where you have permanent control of the content,
presentation, backups, etc. And nobody can ban you, downvote, etc.

~~~
lilsunnybee
You just have to pay for it yourself, which cuts a lot of people out (kids,
low income, etc.)

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npsimons
Hey Facebook users! There's a lesson to be learned here; in case you missed
it:

 _It had no where to go but away. That data was never on the Internet; it
existed in a proprietary format on a proprietary network, far out of reach
from the technological layman. It was then shuffled around, forgotten, and
perhaps overwritten by a series of indifferent corporate overlords._

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dm2
More importantly, where does you data go when business die? To anyone that is
willing to pay for it?

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dspillett
_> To anyone that is willing to pay for it?_

Bingo.

If the business is sold as a potential "going concern" the new owner will have
your information.

If not a "going concern" businesses the assets are still flogged off, if only
to try get some money back for any creditors it may have had, and any data
they have is potentially an asset. Often they will be bought quite cheaply.

Of course someone working for the company as it dies might less officially
take the information.

And if an online service is abandoned as-is and stays online for a while
unattended, the lack of maintenance may mean it is vulnerable to security
flaws it doesn't receive patches for at which point any information stored
there is available to any black-hat who cares to look.

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jflowers45
Prodigy got me online when I was about 7 years old. I played some maze game on
there on my family's 386 over an expensive 9600 baud modem. I also remembering
reading a lot about video game cheat codes on their BBS system ... good times.

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voltagex_
Hah, apparently Prodigy got in a bit of trouble over STAGE.DAT.

[https://www.google.com/search?q=stage.dat+inurl%3Atextfiles....](https://www.google.com/search?q=stage.dat+inurl%3Atextfiles.com)

~~~
canadev
They mention this in the article:

> This same STAGE.DAT got Prodigy in trouble in the early 1990s when users
> discovered that it could contain fragments of data culled from their PCs. As
> it turns out, Prodigy's client was filling in "empty" portions of STAGE.DAT
> with random snippets of system memory. Users were convinced Prodigy was
> spying on them, uploading this data to its servers (it wasn't); Prodigy
> denied this and released a tool for the paranoid to zero out their STAGE.DAT
> files.

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fleitz
I thought Yahoo was where online services went to die.

~~~
pjbrunet
+1 That was my first thought too ;-)

Maybe you could say the same about Google or Lycos?

If nobody wants you, there's always cybersquatters.

