[ih] Really old list archives

[John Gilmore]

Brian E Carpenter via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> There seems to be a lot of material at https://www.eecis.udel.edu/~mills/database/papers/, including inarc.pdf which is how Google got me there.
> 
> Even more stuff up one level at https://www.eecis.udel.edu/~mills/database/
> 
> Probably this is a good time to get that material into a long-term archive.

I have the Internet Archive's Archive-It.org service pulling in a copy
of it now, as well as the rest of Dave's home directory.

I noticed a link out from his Fuzzball page that says:

  "The Fuzzball archive consists of some 16 MB of source code and
  binaries written for the PDP11 Macro Assembler. The last update to the
  archive was in 1992, but it survives to the present for curious seekers."

The link from "survives to the present" leads to

  http://malarky.udel.edu/~dmills/data/du0

which is not responding today.  However, someone at Accelovation.com did
a web crawl of it in 2006, and later donated it to the Internet Archive.
And other crawls from Alexa and the Archive up thru 2014 exist, and are
accessible in the Wayback Machine.

	John

PS: Note, however, that there really is no such thing as a "long-term
archive" for digital data.  The Internet Archive's longevity premise is
that their collection will be too valuable for it to get destroyed by
neglect after its founders and its funding are gone.  They have made two
or three copies of each saved item, often on different tectonic plates,
to protect against storage device failure.  But it's a huge, complicated
software system requiring wizards to keep it maintained.  And there is
no copy of the Archive under different ownership, which leaves a single
point of failure.