
Searching for Tuva: Before the internet and now - IN4RA3D
https://www.blog.google/products/search/searching-tuva-internet-and-now/
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russellbeattie
I think in the future, they'll reset the calendar with what is now 2000 being
year zero. Because everything that happened after that ended up with an
indexed web page, and thus is searchable. They'll call pre-2000 the pre-
digital era and it'll be sort of like the line between Old English and modern
English. I guess eventually we'll digitize everything that's ever been
printed, but still.

Sadly, in the past I remember clearly thinking that, someday, when smart
phones and high speed networks are ubiquitous and literally everyone has
access to all the world's information at a touch of a button, the world would
be a better place due to the increased knowledge of the average person.
Democracy, I thought, could only prosper in the light of such egalitarian
access to information. How wrong I was...

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th0ma5
I share the sentiments of some that believe in our current ephemeral web and
damageable media, we're in a dark age that is worse than before the 90s. No
one is keeping anything in a permanent way yet.

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oblio
To make things even more interesting, because of the overly long copyright,
everyone's clinging on to anything they can. As a result a lot of stuff is
buried and most likely destroyed by the passage of time (how many CDs have you
had that can't be read anymore?). Say what you will about piracy, but it can
surface interesting things people and companies are hoarding in the undefined
hope that sometime in the future they will become valuable again.

Examples:

* source code and assets of games made in the 70's, 80's and 90's: very often you can see even the companies that made these games unable to re-build these games, because they lost the source code (!)

* documentaries from many broadcast networks

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pouetpouet
Many works are left to rot on fragile film reels.

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lsh
"something given has no value". The author is going out of his way to make his
acquisition of information harder so that he might value it more than the same
information that just lands in his lap. Some distinguish data from information
from knowledge from wisdom. Slowing down and forcing oneself to absorb better
- to think and reflect on human scales - is noble, but perhaps the problem is
we need differently shaped brains to deal with this firehose of information.
Attention span suffers at this level, no time to synthesize what we just
absorbed.

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8bitsrule
I 'found my Tuva' last year, a broad and intriguing topic hiding in the
middle-half of the 19th century. And I thought I'd wind up having to go to
physical libraries to get answers to many questions.

No, as it turned out; thanks to the copyright-free status of all the
excellent, digitized books from that era (and the following 50 years of
comments ... also copyright-free). Within a month I had amassed over 2GB of
maps, PDFs of original sources (many from Archive.org), and more than enough
quality, modern commentary.

It was and remains an absorbing adventure tale ... set in an earlier era ...
and I never had to leave this desk.

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Muha_
"Great Soviet Encyclopedia" was translated and published into English. These
books contain a very detailed information about "Tuvinian Autonomous Soviet
Socialist Republic". Finding information before Internet was difficult but not
impossible.

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doombolt
Even if there were no internet you could just buy a plane ticket SFO-KYZ and
in 30 hours you are standing in Kyzyl after a few transfers and a $2000
setback for round-trip. This is thanks to USSR cracking and revealing tasty
pulp. You will still need to get a visa, and consulate in SF is now closed.

