[ih] How the Soviet Union Sent Its First Man to the Internet in 1982

[Leo Vegoda]

On Mon, Aug 08, 2016 at 07:24:21PM +0200, Olivier MJ Crepin-Leblond wrote:

[...]

> > We are leaving a lot of tracks for historians these days.
> 
> Fragile tracks. So much stuff has dropped off line, including a lot of
> USENET gold nuggets... 

It was my understanding that Google bought Dejanews and put some
work into extending that archive. While I doubt it is complete it is
still huge.

> I sometimes think of a suitcase containing around
> 20Kg of printed documents spurted out from a DEC LP37 back in 1989,
> currently in storage with things I've never seen online since. Stuff
> like a handful of documents from the online CSNET archive. I hope the
> ink keeps well.

I am not a professional historian but it is my understanding that
while parchment might offer a very high quality long-term storage
medium, a single copy of a book would take the skins or a whole herd
of animals. That made books a very expensive product. And while
paper was cheaper, it relied upon old rags and so was also pretty
expensive. It was only in the 18th century that mass production of
paper became possible.

Even with incomplete sets of records, the last century will offer
historians a scale of documentation without precedent to future
historians.

Regards,

Leo