
Screenshots Forever and Ever Until You Can’t Stand it - cleverjake
http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/4365
======
mwill
Jason Scott in general is one of my internet heroes. A lot of what he covers
in his work is before my time, so it doesn't carry any nostalgia for me, but
appeals on a different level altogether.

Books I've read, and classes I took in school, covered the history of the net
and computers, but only the things that they feel is 'important', you get the
overview of the evolution of programming languages, history of the computer,
and timeline of the internet and world wide web. In each case, it feels like
it's all about linking one big advancement to the next big advancement.

What you get from Jason's documentaries and presentations and sites however,
is this really raw and honest look at what real people were actually doing at
the time. It's hard to explain why that feels so important to me, but it does.

~~~
mulletboy
If you're interested in the history of the Web and its inception, I highly
recommend you this (non-technical) reading [1] by Tim Berners Lee. Really
inspiring.

[1] [http://www.amazon.com/Weaving-Web-Original-Ultimate-
Destiny/...](http://www.amazon.com/Weaving-Web-Original-Ultimate-
Destiny/dp/006251587X)

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manifest23
One of my first websites was an emulation site in 1999/2000\. SNES was by far
the most popular category on the site so I had the bright idea to play 2-3
minutes of every single game in order to take a screenshot of the game-play.
Three months later I was finally done. Then I lost everything in hard drive
crash before I could push the new version of my site live. Dammit.

------
micah63
Man, I've been looking for the name of a Sega Genesis game for a long time and
couldn't remember it. I just saw it on your site. "Atomic Rob-Kid" was one of
the best games I've ever played. Super hard and super frustrating, but it has
a great feel!

[https://www.flickr.com/photos/textfiles/14811059366/in/set-7...](https://www.flickr.com/photos/textfiles/14811059366/in/set-72157646180733361)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_Robo-
Kid](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_Robo-Kid)

------
rdtsc
Ah ZX Spectrum that takes me back. I learned assembler on it, BASIC, had a
Pascal and C compiler even (the last two had to load from tape). Made one
mistake and had to reload the whole thing again and wait 5 minutes or so.

It was amazing how there was this closeness to the machine, you boot right
into the programming environment and had to type a command to load a game or
do anything.

Some of the games I remember were exceptional, Elite was one of them. Just
thinking about the ability to pack everything in 48K of memory.

~~~
stevekemp
I got into programming after receiving a 48k spectrum for Chrismas as a child,
which arrived with a broken tape deck.

No "Hungry Horace" for me, instead it was the (very readable) manual to work
through. Happily z80 machine code prepared me well for Intel assembly.

Even now I play chaos every month or two:
[http://torinak.com/qaop#!chaos](http://torinak.com/qaop#!chaos) along with a
couple of other games.

------
ErikRogneby
Wow, this is pretty spectacular.

I wonder if the copyright office collected information about the platform a
game would run on when it was copyrighted? Could probably figure some of it
out by the publisher. I might have to go look for that data to mine.

------
jmduke
I've been thinking a lot the past few weeks about the preservation of art and
goods in general. I think it comes from two main sources:

1\. Maciej Ceglowski (`idlewords) has been talking a lot recently about link
rot. Recently, he found that 25% of items pinned a mere five years ago were
dead links and 17% from only three years ago were dead [^1]. That's an
incredibly high rate -- and, selfishly, one I'm noticing as my bookmark
folders for recipes (RIP BroEats.com) and designs and other things is filled
with more and more duds.

2\. I've been reading _Do Not Sell At Any Price_ [^2], a book about the
subculture of 78rpms. These are records that are so rare and so -- for lack of
a better term -- unwanted by the vast majority of the music-listening populace
that the act of collecting them is less about hoarding and more about
preservation. To quote one of the characters in the book (roughly from
memory):

 _" It's a weird feeling, holding this thing in your hand and knowing that you
could break the song," he said. "I snap this record in half and this song is
lost forever. It's a lot of responsibility, and sometimes I think that's why I
take it so seriously."_

I can honestly say that, prior to reading this article, I had no idea what a
ZX Spectrum was. Now, after some digging, I do -- and I still have no desire
to play one, obtain one, or hold onto it in any meaningful way. (And seeing as
I'm usually on the weirdly attached end of the spectrum with these kinds of
things, I doubt I'm the only one.) But I'm struck by how important it is to
hold onto these things, even if its in a cardboard box in a forgotten closet
somewhere or a link on the Internet Archive that gets clicked once every
couple decades.

I'm not positing that there will ever be a point in time that someone has the
hankering to play ZX Spectrum Xtreme Chess, but I think there's inherent value
in preserving this ecosystem -- something of a testament to the people who
made it, the people who played it, the novelty that at one point in time there
were five million living rooms with this machine in it.

The Web turned 25 this year, and it's already coming down with acute cases of
memory loss. I'm hoping that by the time it hits fifty, the problem won't have
gotten worse -- it will have gotten much, much better, not just with URLs but
with remembering the time when people played _3D StarFighter_ by the Oliver
Twins. [^4]

(This is a very roundabout way of saying the following: Jason, you are
completely awesome for doing this, and thanks for sharing it with us.)

[^1]
[https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/501406303747457024](https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/501406303747457024)

[^2] [http://www.amazon.com/Not-Sell-Any-Price-Obsessive-
ebook/dp/...](http://www.amazon.com/Not-Sell-Any-Price-Obsessive-
ebook/dp/B00GEEB9XI/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=undefined&sr=8-1&keywords=Do+Not+Sell+At+Any+Price)

[^3] The nice things about IA links is you can pretty reasonably assume that
they won't suffer from link rot, right?

[^4]
[https://www.flickr.com/photos/textfiles/14771850314/in/set-7...](https://www.flickr.com/photos/textfiles/14771850314/in/set-72157645599736559)

~~~
ijk
> _The nice things about IA links is you can pretty reasonably assume that
> they won 't suffer from link rot, right?_

The catch there being, the Internet Archive retroactively respects robots.txt
that forbid crawling, so if someone gets control of a domain they can block
the archived pages. This is a big problem with lapsed domains that get swept
under the umbrella of a holding company that has lots of domains pointing to
the same content, with a blanket robots.txt.

~~~
jleader
A few years ago I talked to an IA engineer, who said they were planning on
dealing with this by not crawling sites whose nameservers were known to point
to a domain parking company. The idea was that if they never retrieved the
robots.txt, they wouldn't retroactively apply it. I don't know if that
filtering out of parking nameservers ever happened, and it wouldn't help for
parked domains whose robots.txt they'd already retrieved, but but it would
help with domains that lapse in the future.

~~~
StavrosK
But why retroactively remove the data? The original owner was fine with
holding it, why should the snapshot be deleted because a completely different
person wants his completely different website to not be crawled?

~~~
bjt
It's hard for a bot to understand concepts of 'owner' and 'completely
different person' based on the data they have available. Companies can use
this robots.txt feature to un-index old marketing content after a re-branding,
for example. Or after an acquisition.

~~~
StavrosK
Sure, but, surely, the bot has timestamps saying "robots.txt allowed me to
keep these documents last time I spidered them". Why do they have to be
retroactively removed? robots.txt only disallows spidering, it doesn't mandate
that you should delete all the data you've already spidered.

~~~
db48x
Because most of the problems come from people who want to hide old material
that they didn't realize was being indexed. The automatic behavior is simple
and easy to implement, and doesn't require any human intervention.

