
I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked - slyall
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/paabgg/i-bought-a-book-about-the-internet-from-1994-and-none-of-the-links-worked
======
whatever_dude
I've had a similar problem. In updating my portfolio site recently, I noticed
a vast majority of links were dead. Not just live projects published maybe 3
years or more ago (I expect those to die). But also links to articles and
mentions from barely one year ago, or links to award sites, and the like. With
a site listing projects going back ~15 years, one can imagine how bad things
were.

I had to end up creating a link component that would automatically link to an
archive.org version of the link on every URL if I marked as "dead". It was so
prevalent it had to be automated like that.

Another reason why I've been contributing $100/year to the Internet Archive
for the past 3 years and will continue to do so. They're doing some often
unsung but important work.

~~~
LoSboccacc
beware: robots.txt can retroactively clear archive.org data

~~~
deadalus
another reason to use archive.is

~~~
pilsetnieks
Considering the topic of discussion, how sure can you be that archive.is will
still be around in a year? Three years? Ten?

As much as I tried, all I could find about it is that it's run by one guy in
Czech Republic who's paying $2000/month out of pocket for hosting, and
apparently dislikes Finland.

~~~
exikyut
It's actually worse - [http://blog.archive.is/post/151510917631/how-do-you-
guys-kee...](http://blog.archive.is/post/151510917631/how-do-you-guys-keep-
the-lights-on-i-gave-the) says it's $4k/mo.

[http://archive.is/robots.txt](http://archive.is/robots.txt) doesn't seem too
bad, it looks like you could slowly inhale everything... _in theory_. There
are no sitemaps (they're there, but empty placeholders); you have to know the
site name to be able to get a workable list.

The author hasn't ruled out/blocked archiving the snapshots, but apparently
it's... big. [http://blog.archive.is/post/154930531126/if-someone-was-
will...](http://blog.archive.is/post/154930531126/if-someone-was-willing-to-
make-a)

------
CharlesDodgson
I miss the optimism of the early web, when you could create a simple web page,
join a web ring and going online was an event. It's richer and deeper now, but
the rawness and simpleness of it all was enjoyable and novel.

~~~
addicted
Is it richer and deeper now?

Maybe at the fringes, but I feel that the internet today, with my emphasis
being on the "inter" (different) "net" (networks) part of it, is far less
deeper or richer than before. What we basically have reduced to are a bunch of
siloed netowrks such as Facebook.

When I searched for something when Google first came out I got a mix of
results from a variety of sites I had never heard about. Today it's basically
Wikipedia at the top, with results from the same list of about 3-4 sites
depending on the topic of what I searched for.

~~~
hawski
I'm beginning to think that there is a niche for a peculiar kind of a search
engine. A search engine for static almost-none to none JavaScript pages. It
would penalize pages for ad-network usage.

I would really like to not have in search results most sites that try to
monetize on my attention. I want raw facts and opinions. No click-bait to grab
my attention or feed my internal cave man with rage. No ad-networks or data
extraction operations. Just pages put there by people that want to share
knowledge and ideas. I mostly find it on pages that lack ads and often are
pure HTML - no CSS and no JS. At least in areas that interest me.

Maybe there is a place for a search engine that would index only pages like
that? It certainly would be easier than competing with Google on indexing
whole of the attention-whoring Internet.

~~~
bloaf
[https://millionshort.com/](https://millionshort.com/)

~~~
jszymborski
Awesome, filtered top 10^6, removed sites with ads and e-commerce, typed in
"enigma machine" and got some great gems:

[http://ciphermachines.com/index.html](http://ciphermachines.com/index.html)
[http://enigma.louisedade.co.uk/howitworks.html](http://enigma.louisedade.co.uk/howitworks.html)

~~~
_asummers
If you're interested in Enigma machines and find yourself in Maryland, you can
play with one at the NSA museum next to Ft. Meade.

------
ChrisSD
Related to this, I had trouble finding examples of pre 1996 web design. The
internet archive has a lot from 1997 onwards. The oldest live examples of
sites from that era, that I know of are:

[http://www.w3.org/History/19921103-hypertext/hypertext/WWW/T...](http://www.w3.org/History/19921103-hypertext/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html)

[http://oreilly.com/gnn/gnnhome.html](http://oreilly.com/gnn/gnnhome.html)

[http://www.trincoll.edu/zines/tj/tj12.02.93/tjcontents.html](http://www.trincoll.edu/zines/tj/tj12.02.93/tjcontents.html)

The BBC also donated its Networking Club to the Internet Archive:
[https://archive.org/details/bbcnc.org.uk-19950301](https://archive.org/details/bbcnc.org.uk-19950301)

~~~
cJ0th
[https://www.warnerbros.com/archive/spacejam/movie/jam.htm](https://www.warnerbros.com/archive/spacejam/movie/jam.htm)
;)

~~~
orbitur
There's even a Twitter account (created in 2013) that checks if it's still up,
every 3 hours.

[https://twitter.com/SpaceJamCheck](https://twitter.com/SpaceJamCheck)

------
kutkloon7
This is a very important reason why books, in general, contain better
information that websites. On websites, people care a lot less about the
correctness of the information. You can just update stuff later (of course,
this doesn't always happen).

Also, sites are a very volatile medium. I often bookmark pages with
interesting information to read later, and it inevitably happens once in a
while that a site went down and I just can't find the information anymore.

~~~
rahiel
> Also, sites are a very volatile medium. I often bookmark pages with
> interesting information to read later, and it inevitably happens once in a
> while that a site went down and I just can't find the information anymore.

I had the same experience and that's why I made a browser extension that
archives pages when you bookmark them.
([https://github.com/rahiel/archiveror](https://github.com/rahiel/archiveror))

~~~
kbenson
Maybe something that archives to IPFS would be interesting. As things are
marked as interesting, they are both archived and distributed based on
interest.

------
jacquesm
Linkrot is a real problem. Especially for those sites that disappear before
the archive can get to them.

On another note, the more dynamic the web becomes the harder it will be to
archive so if you think that the 1994 content is a problem wait until you live
in 2040 and you want to read some pages from 2017.

~~~
TheAnimus
Turns out the solution to every stack overflow post will be

"JavaScript is required"

~~~
rahiel
Content from Stack Overflow has higher odds to survive than this, they've
uploaded a data dump of all user-contributed data to archive.org:
[https://archive.org/details/stackexchange](https://archive.org/details/stackexchange).
It's all plaintext. This is really generous of Stack Exchange and shows they
care for the long-term.

~~~
stordoff
I assume the anonymisation is just on votes? It doesn't seem 100% clear at
first glance.

------
amelius
Solution: [https://ipfs.io](https://ipfs.io)

> The average lifespan of a web page is 100 days. Remember GeoCities? The web
> doesn't anymore. It's not good enough for the primary medium of our era to
> be so fragile.

> IPFS provides historic versioning (like git) and makes it simple to set up
> resilient networks for mirroring of data.

~~~
Jtsummers
IPFS is good and useful, but it only retains what people choose to retain.

If geocities.com/aoeu isn't popular, then IPFS won't store it unless someone
bothered to pin it. And as soon as they stop, it'll disappear.

You need a dedicated host (like archive.org) to retain it, or volunteers
willing to coordinate and commit their resources. Otherwise it's just more
resilient (a good thing), but not permanent.

~~~
ric2b
> Otherwise it's just more resilient (a good thing), but not permanent.

It's not "just" more resilient, It's also much more elegant and convenient:
with the current web you need to go find some archive version of the dead link
you found, while with IPFS the link can simply work, even after the creator
stops hosting it.

------
mfoy_
A similarly really annoying thing is when you find old technet articles, stack
overflow questions, or blog posts that seem potentially really useful, but
that have broken images, broken links, etc... so the content (possibly
extremely useful at the time) is completely useless now.

It really stresses the importance of directly quoting / paraphrasing the
content you want in your plain text, and not relying on external resources for
posterity.

~~~
c22
The one I hate is when I find old forum posts explaining how to do something
in the physical world and all the embedded photos are broken. Not because the
image host went out of business or the user deleted them, but just because
they didn't log in for a year and the host deactivated their account. This is
why whenever I link a photo I upload it to my own server and I never change
the URL.

~~~
Sleeep
I apologize in advance as there's no non-morbid way to ask this but... what
happens to the images on your server if you die tomorrow? It would be exactly
the same situation, right? They would exist until your bill is due in a couple
years then your account will be deactivated and your images will linkrot.

~~~
c22
I have the server paid up for 10 years and the domain for 15. But it's true,
eventually all things must end. I do have credentials for all the things
written into my will so I guess it ultimately depends on how much my children
care about preserving my helpful forum posts.

------
indescions_2017
See also: Best of the Web '94 Awards. Presented at the First International
Conference on the World-Wide Web, Geneva, Switzerland, May 1994.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_International_Conference...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_International_Conference_on_the_World-
Wide_Web#Best_of_the_Web_Awards)

What's cool isn't how fast some of these technologies become obsolete, such as
various Java applets and cgi-bin connected webcams. It's the static content
that can survive until the end of time.

Like Nicolas Pioch's Web Museum. Bienvenue!

[http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/](http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/)

~~~
jerven
I must say the swiss-prot links from then still work. You are redirected to
the uniprot.org website but the links work.

------
drewg123
> [The Rolling Stones] actually streamed a concert on the platform in November
> of that year, using an online provider named MBone for some reason..

The MBone was not a "provider", it was an IP multicast network. This was the
only way to efficiently stream video content to thousands of simultaneous
clients before the advent of CDNs.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mbone](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mbone)

~~~
jandrese
MBone lost its reason to exist when the internet backbone turned out to be
much easier to upgrade than the edges. There's not much need to implement a
complicated proxy system to save bandwidth on the backbone when almost
everybody is constrained by their last mile link.

For years I thought TV stations might connect to the MBone to do simulcasts
for people on the Internet once broadband became widespread, but the world
moved on before it could become a reality. Part of me still thinks this is a
missed opportunity but it's too late to cry over it now.

~~~
Symbiote
My internship, in 2006, involved working on an IPTV prototype for Philips. I
remember working on a multicast server and the set-top-box client -- the
server had a DVB-T card, and rebroadcast all the BBC channels over the LAN.
Since the stream was always there, changing channel was extremely fast. DVB
broadcasts information packets regularly, containing the TV schedule and so
on. These were also forwarded over IP, and then cached by the STB.

It was neat, but presumably most of the multicast stuff was abandoned not long
after I left.

Someone else worked on a system to help the user schedule their TV around the
broadcast times.

~~~
_joel
The problem with using multicast for content delivery is more down to the
subscriber end and how ISPs manage their networks. I worked on a (recent)
project that uses multicast in the broadcast context at the mezzanine level.
When you've got full control of the network, end to end, it works a lot
better.

~~~
jandrese
The subscriber end...and the goddamn Internet backbone. You can't route
multicast across the core, which is a huge impediment to its adoption.

There was a vicious circle where the core didn't do multicast so the big iron
routers didn't put multicast support in hardware, which made it impossible to
support multicast on the core...

------
sjclemmy
I've got a book about javascript from 1995. It mentions closure once and says
something like "... but you'll never need to use that feature of the
language."

How I laughed.

~~~
JustSomeNobody
Never say "Never" or "Always".

------
neoCrimeLabs
Somewhat Unrelated.

I noticed that the wayback machine no longer lists historical sites if the
latest/last revision of robots.txt denies access. Has anyone else experienced
this?

In the late-90's I helped build one of the first fortune-500 e-commerce web
sites. The website was shutdown years ago, but it view viewable on the wayback
machine as recently as a year ago. The company in question put a deny-all
robots.txt on the domain, and now none of the history is viewable.

It's a shame -- used to use that website (and an easteregg with my name on it)
as proof of experience.

~~~
biofox
Applying denials retroactively makes no sense whatsoever -- it defeats the
whole point of archiving.

Do you know if archive.org still has a copy?

------
interfixus
I read an internet article from 2017 and none of the stuff worked without
access to all sorts of third party scripts and crap.

~~~
wila
Yip, the irony is that the article about this does not even load on my tablet.
Perhaps because of ad blocking at dns level, perhaps not, it does paint a
picture though.

edit: also doesn't load on a desktop here.

------
garethsprice
I Bought a Book of Restaurant Recommendations from 1957 and None of them would
Serve Me Dinner Any More

~~~
ControlledBurn
I bought a telephone book from 1942 and none of the phone numbers work

~~~
Sleeep
The phone numbers accompanying the phat 90s slang scrawled across my 1996
yearbook no longer are a way of contacting my old classmates.

------
umanwizard
My uncle Pat wrote this book (and multiple others in the same series). I'm
amazed Vice is talking about it over twenty years later and I'm sure he will
be too once I show him the link!

I had lots of fun reading them as an Internet-addicted kid -- but several of
the links were dead even before it was officially published.

------
panglott
"It was possible to get on a text-based version of the internet for free in
many areas, using only a modem and a phone line. An entire section of Free
$tuff From the Internet offers up a lengthy list of free-nets, grassroots
phone systems that essentially allowed for free access to text-based online
resources."

Makes me want to try to read a Markdown-only Internet browser, which treats
native Markdown documents as the only kind of Web page.

~~~
kronos29296
You would have to give up all the dynamic convienience we take for granted.
Menus would be just links. Basically you would have HN like sites for the
small ones and the big ones would have images. That's it.

On second thought that wouldn't be so bad considering the bloat we have to
deal with nowadays. (1 MB per page for just news from sites like CNN ugh.)

------
jedberg
I owned (and still do own) this book! I would spend many hours as a teenager
going through the links and accessing all the cool stuff in the book. This
really brings back memories!

And yes, the way I got on the internet in those days was to dial into a public
Sprintlink number, then telnet to a card catalog terminal in the Stanford
library, and then send the telnet "Break" command at exactly the right time to
break out of the card catalog program and have unfettered internet access.
Good times.

~~~
cestith
I was lucky. A public library had a dial-in account with lynx as the shell and
the card catalog an inter-library loan systems served as web pages. I just had
to hit 'g' and type in any URL, including Gopher, WAIS, Archie, or telnet
ones. This left me no great way by itself to get things downloaded locally,
but I could telnet into a shell elsewhere, download things to there, and feed
them back via zmodem through the telnet and the dialup.

That was before I had a local PPP provider, of course.

------
memracom
Did you try looking them up at archive.org? I expect that many of them will
work there.

The web is ephemeral unless somebody archives it. Many companies offer an
archive service for your sites for a fee, and archive.org does it to provide a
historical record,

------
Havoc
Yup. Recently promised a colleague a pdf. I knew what I was looking for, who
wrote it and and which site it was on (regional site of my employer). It even
featured highly on google (showed up on related searches).

Zilch. Nada...couldn't find it anymore. Gone. Something I had easily chanced
upon before I know couldn't find with directed searching. They must have
restructured their site.

------
komali2
The article indicates that the "free" stuff on the internet was hidden away in
weird places - ftp servers and the like. No google to find it for you, the
only way was by word of mouth, or I guess via published book.

Answers a question I always had about "Snow Crash" by Neal Stephenson. The
main character, Hiro Protagonist (I still giggle at that name), sometimes did
work as a kind of data wrangler - "gathering intel and selling it to the CIC,
the for-profit organization that evolved from the CIA's merger with the
Library of Congress" (Wikipedia).

I always wondered what made that feasible as a sort of profit model, and I
guess now I know - that was the state of the internet in 1992, when the book
was published. Seems like a way cooler time period for Cyberpunk stuff, I'm
almost sad I missed it :(

~~~
epc
We did have search engines, just not as fast or encompassing as Google. Archie
came online in 1990 (
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archie_search_engine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archie_search_engine)
). Jughead and Veronica followed (
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jughead_(search_engine)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jughead_\(search_engine\))
,
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veronica_(search_engine)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veronica_\(search_engine\))
). More often than not a search started with a Usenet newsgroup FAQ.

~~~
cestith
Don't forget we had Gopher and WAIS before the Web, too.

------
usaphp
Well if you purchase a yellow book from 1994 I doubt you will find many
businesses listed there to still exist and show correct phone numbers...

~~~
paulddraper
??? Huh ???

You think most businesses are less than 24 years old? Or do you think
businesses change phone numbers every few years?

~~~
hayksaakian
Most businesses fail within the first few years. 24 years later much would
have changed.

------
peterwwillis
Man, I really miss FTP. I remember when you would just FTP to the site you
were using and grab a binary from their /pub/. Mirrors were plentiful, and FXP
could distribute files without needing a shell on a file server.

~~~
gaius
I remember when you could just mount \\\ftp.microsoft.com\pub as a drive on
your PC. Raw, unauthenticated, unencrypted SMB over the public Internet. At
least it was read-only share. Good times.

~~~
Sleeep
I remember Geocities pages would always be trying to read from my floppy
drive. People would not realize you had to upload your pictures before other
people could see them and just would put D:\pictures\goatse.jpg as the src of
the img tag because they didn't really understand the web (not that I blame
them.) Of course, the browser had no problem trying to load local images from
untrusted code on a remote host, security policies were, uh, _extremely_
permissive at the time.

(Of course, there would be plenty of attempting to read from the C:\ drive
too, but that didn't make a loud, unexpected sound like reading from the
floppy drive did)

Simple times.

~~~
peterwwillis
Yeah, you had to remember to change all the links in the html because
FrontPage Express kept saving the local full path so you could keep working on
and previewing your site on a browser. HTTP server software (on Windows
anyway) was so obscure that you had no idea how to get a free one running on
your desktop unless you had access to Windows NT with IIS. All that changed
when I installed Mandrake for the first time...

------
littleweep
I mean, this isn't all that surprising. Not unlike buying a twenty-year-old
visitor's guide to a city and finding that a number of the shops and
restaurants have closed, the stadiums have different names, etc.

~~~
jacquesm
I don't know about that.

People tend to think that our society is very well documented but if you look
at what is left of old societies it is usually whatever was engraved in stone
or if you're lucky what remained on paper. With the internet replacing most or
even all of the paper storage in the short term it is true (besides our
present day paper not being acid free to last long enough anyway), we are
better documented than ever. But in the longer term it may be a huge gaping
hole in history.

And that's different than cities changing at their regular pace and books
becoming less dated. It's like the visitor guide _itself_ is no longer
readable and therefore you won't even know what was there in the past.

------
RJIb8RBYxzAMX9u
I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing. For one, the 80/20 rule applied
back then just as it does today, so most of what's lost is crap to begin with.
It's no different than in the real world: surely nobody's lamenting that you
can't pick up a copy of Fordyce's _Sermons_ anymore (and I presume that it'd
be long forgotten if not for Austen). While some valuable resources were
undoubtedly lost, most live on re-posted elsewhere, like memes, but in a
"good" way.

Secondly, the book is more analogous to a map or dictionary, and it ought to
be a descriptive source, not a prescriptive one. Some language purists may
disagree, but I could care less :-). And similar to an old, outdated, map,
you'd expect that the details may have changed, but the landmarks are most
likely still accurate. NASA's still nasa.gov, MIT's still mit.edu -- well,
IIRC www.mit.edu used to point to their library's portal, and web.mit.edu
their main page; I see that's changed -- and CompuServ still...exists.

------
belak
This reminds me of the Final Fantasy IX strategy guide. It integrated with
Square Enix's Play Online service but now that FFIX was removed from Play
Online, none of the links work any more and the guide is pretty much useless.
I'm sure we'll start to see more of this in the coming years. It's not really
sustainable to keep a website running forever.

~~~
jandrese
If the service is still running then the added cost of hosting legacy content
is near zero. Assuming the site wasn't full of bandwidth hogging live video or
anything like that the cost of storage and hosting are almost zero.

Keeping a whole server running however does get a bit more expensive, but you
could also rehost it on a cloud provider for a very modest cost per month.

------
debJC
Thank god for Archive.org

This was my first professional website (19yrs ago!) for the largest Banking
Agency and holding company at the time:

DOREMUS
[https://web.archive.org/web/19980204230930/http://www.doremu...](https://web.archive.org/web/19980204230930/http://www.doremus.com:80/wsn/)

DAS
[https://web.archive.org/web/19981203013454/http://www.dasglo...](https://web.archive.org/web/19981203013454/http://www.dasglobal.com:80/main.html)

Sadly my 1st Print Interactive Award for best Shockwave site requires a
plugin:
[https://web.archive.org/web/19990429113419/http://www.eyebal...](https://web.archive.org/web/19990429113419/http://www.eyeballonthefloor.com:80/)

------
stesch
Can't see the article with NoScript. :-)

~~~
kronos29296
They should make sites incompatible with NoScript illegal. Back in my days
(lol its just 10+ years) they used plain text for Web pages and used
javascript like custom animation in presentations. Now only javascript is
there with some html sprinkled in between.

P.S the rest of it was in Flash though. So no back button for you.

~~~
overcast
That's just silly. The dynamic nature of javascript is what caused the
explosion of websites around 2007, due to the advent of jQuery. Saying we
should all go back to plain text is just being an old grump. Should it be
overused? No. Just like GIFs shouldn't have been overused on Geocities.

~~~
CaptSpify
I generally agree with you but...

> The dynamic nature of javascript is what caused the explosion of websites
> around 2007, due to the advent of jQuery.

I'm not convinced that was a good thing. Pretty much all of that content is
terrible. Quality > Quantity

~~~
overcast
That doesn't really mean anything though in the context of things.

~~~
CaptSpify
Sure it does. The grandparent is saying that we should have a higher quality
web, and you are saying that we should have a more dynamic web.

~~~
overcast
I'm not saying we should have a more dynamic one. But JS fundamentally changed
how we interact with websites, and it's here to stay. The majority of big
players in the last decaded wouldn't have existed without the dynamic
interaction. Saying we should go back to static only, is nonsense.

~~~
CaptSpify
I completely disagree. The majority of big players has poisoned the waterhole.
They've made the web _less_ usable because of how they've made things dynamic.
I think going back to static would have some negative impact, but it would
make things better for everyone overall.

------
dep_b
Just yesterday I was helping an uncle changing the Flash-based menu of his
site about classic race cars to a newer one so it would actually show on
phones. It was all .htm files that included the Flash menu every time,
apparently he worked with some kind of 15-year old copy of Dreamweaver that
would add it to the top of every page he created like a template.

I could have switched it to a PHP include but that would either break all
existing links, take a bit of work to make .htm files execute PHP or to make
them forward permanently to their PHP versions. Or I simply could do the only
sane thing: loading menu.php on every page within an IFRAME and changing his
15 years old Dreamweaver template.

The internet has been saved! A bit at least!

~~~
handedness
Any chance you can point us to the site? Sounds fun.

~~~
dep_b
Well alright:

[http://www.cupecitas.com.ar](http://www.cupecitas.com.ar)

It hasn't been updated yet though!

~~~
handedness
Fun throwback. Thanks.

~~~
dep_b
Well throwback....it's updated weekly!

~~~
handedness
Oh sure, the updates are current, but the feel of the site itself and the fun
vehicles depicted are quite retro! (And satisfyingly so, I should add.)

------
livrem
I have used the Firefox ScrapBook extension for over 10 years. It saves a
static dump of the DOM of the page you are looking at (and all images) so it
does not depend on anything external to show the page and you can save pages
that required a login or was generated by any amount of complex javascripts.
Also saves a link to the original site and comes with features to edit pages
and join them (those annoying articles spread out over multiple pages to show
more ads) and more. There is a clone of it for Chrome as well that I have not
tried.

------
vhost-
I've been an arch linux user for a very long time. I very much praise the
documentation and it always gets me 90% of the way there when trying to solve
a problem or configure something. But when I need that extra 10% I can usually
find someone on the forums with a similar issue and the solution is usually a
huge rabbit hole of links and some are broken, which gets really frustrating
because I have to hope that it was cached by archive.org.

------
twic
> The Rolling Stones [...] actually streamed a concert on the platform in
> November of that year, using an online provider named MBone for some reason

"For some reason"! That's the flipping multicast backbone you're talking about
there! One of the great lost dreams of the internet!

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mbone](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mbone)

------
pc2g4d
This problem has concerned me for some time. One solution would be for
websites to declare their license (Creative Commons, proprietary, public
domain, etc.) and then web pages can embed the content of pages linked to when
the license allows it.

A web with content-based addressing and versioning built into the protocol
could also deal with this situation more gracefully, but again there are
copyright issues.

------
JepZ
Well yeah, it sucks. I think the problem here is, that an URL was supposed to
be a stable, unique identifier for a ressource (like a UUID). But at the same
time humans have to enter them and therefore they have to be nice, shiny and
up to date with the latest trends, which causes them to change constantly...

Maybe we should built a DHT containing UUIDs for all pages als alternative,
stable URIs :D

------
glangdale
The reason the book didn't mention spam all that much is that it was from 1994
and probably mostly (or entirely) written before April 12, 1994, which is when
the infamous "immigration lawyer spam" hit every newsgroup. It wasn't the
first spam, obviously, but it did seem to mark a line where spam (USENET and
email) became more and more prevalent.

------
bluejellybean
I have been wanting to find or build a tool that checked if a link was dead
before redirecting my browser. If the link turned out dead, just redirect to
the appropriate internet archive[0] link. Problem somewhat solved as long as
the archive doesn't go bust.

[https://archive.org/](https://archive.org/)

------
a-dub
[https://web.archive.org/web/19961220034419/http://www.ncsa.u...](https://web.archive.org/web/19961220034419/http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/SDG/Software/Mosaic/NCSAMosaicHome.html)

------
aaron695
For millions of years 'people' did or made cool things.

There must be billions+ of artistic objects and acts lost from the past.

Does it matter if they ALL don't make it? (I wish a lot more did, but ALL?)

In fact their loss adds value in many ways, if Woodstock was exactly the same
year in year out would it have been as special to those who went.

------
ernsheong
I'm working on [https://www.pagedash.com](https://www.pagedash.com), sort of a
personal web archive. Hope it helps people like journalists or authors to keep
links alive with their original content, even if the original website goes
down.

~~~
nebabyte
Sounds like pinboard.io

~~~
ernsheong
Difference is that PageDash can archive pages that require authentication
because it uses a browser extension to retrieve page assets (it doesn't just
delegate the work to a server to do the crawling). It also can grab stuff
within iframes. Basically the main feature is "archive the page exactly as you
saw it".

------
INTPenis
Where did you live in 1994? Who lives there now? Is the building still
standing?

I'm sure I'd get mixed answers to that and that's still the physical world,
not the virtual one where "buildings" can come and go at the press of a
button.

------
joannaz
This is why projects to do with Internet archiving such as
[https://archain.org/](https://archain.org/) interest me, as imagine all of
the dead links and data lost 23 years from now!

------
SubiculumCode
The solution to link rot (and to privacy invasion) is to download the
internet.

~~~
andai
Could you please clarify?

~~~
SubiculumCode
1\. Download the internets. 2\. git the diffs.

Privacy comes because if everyone has the internet in their local cache (lol),
then external servers can't say what _YOU_ are _REALLY_ looking at.

~~~
kronos29296
Best of luck trying to scale git. Microsoft took 3 years and they didn't add
Office and Windows to it. And they nearly rewrote their own version of git.

~~~
Jtsummers
IPFS seems to work effectively for storing versions of files. The downside is,
as I mentioned in another post, that it's not permanent. Someone has to pin it
or it'll disappear. But it doesn't require anything as complicated to use
_today_ as trying to modify git to do something it wasn't meant for.

------
rffn
Lycos and Yahoo are still around. The book really does not have them?

~~~
aidenn0
Those were both founded in 1994, and the book spent relatively little time
discussing the web (much of which still works, according to the article,
despite the headline)

~~~
rffn
Mea culpa. I just read the heading and remembered the old times when they told
us that Lycos finds everything. The author only briefly mentions Usenet. That
was great fun at the time though.

~~~
notahacker
I have an internet guide from 1995 which describes Usenet and its varying
focuses and levels of seriousness in great detail, including an extended
section on trolling which concludes memorably by explaining that people that
do this "probably have a very small penis (especially the girls)", which could
just as easily have been written about Twitter yesterday.

Every time I read something about how social media is changing everything, I
remember that it pre-dated the web by a decade...

------
meerita
I have tons of books from 1990-2002. I have to recover those CDs that came
with magazines, those CDs have mirrored websites, almost entirely.

~~~
jaclaz
Just in case there is an interesting resource here:

[http://cd.textfiles.com/](http://cd.textfiles.com/)

they are essentially "shareware" CD's of the early '90's, but some are more or
less "snapshots" of what was available on the web, check this one as an
example:

The Internet Info CDROM

From Walnut Creek (July 1994)

[http://cd.textfiles.com/internetinfo](http://cd.textfiles.com/internetinfo)

[http://cd.textfiles.com/internetinfo/index.txt](http://cd.textfiles.com/internetinfo/index.txt)

------
j45
I run into this a lot and use diigo.com to cache the sites I visit to ensure
anything I found useful enough to bookmark continues to exist in my life.

------
free2buandme
[https://archive.org/web/](https://archive.org/web/)

------
whipoodle
Much of the appeal of software and the internet is that they can change
quickly. We would also like them to never change.

------
basicplus2
I think it should be considered best practice to not only provide links but
host a copy of what you are linking to.

------
gigavinyl
I know this is sort of side-stepping the issue but isn't this what the Wayback
Machine is for?

------
kazishariar
Whatever happened to Project Xanadu? Wasn't that 'apposed to address these?

------
anigbrowl
Yeah I'm afraid to try this with my book which came out around the same time
XD

------
aorth
I can't even find _my own_ tweets sometimes. We're so screwed.

------
ElectricPenguin
The AOL disk in the back of the book doesn't work either.

------
ashwn
LOL the link to Vice didn't even work for me.

------
based2
archive.org

