[ih] Archive of internet-history email (and others)

[John Gilmore]

The passage of time is not good for digital documents.  Unless they are
deliberately copied onto new media and "ported forward", they tend to
become rare, and then as systems are decommissioned or former
administrators die, they become very hard to access, and eventually
impossible.  This is true of paper records too.  We get periodic requests
for such things here on the list.

For example, we'd naively think that all the RFC's would have been
copied a bezillion times and they would be easy to access even decades
later.  But RFC 872 by Mike Padlipsky referenced two hand-drawn figures
that you could only get by writing to Mike.  The RFC administrators
didn't scan them in, photograph them, xerox them, etc; they weren't
ascii text so they didn't travel with the rest of the RFCs.  Apparently,
nobody has a copy today.  Oops.

Brian wrote:
> If this list (and its predecessor) has any value, it's *only* as an
> archive for future historians, and IMHO we should be glad that
> somebody is willing to archive the old material independently.

I agree.  And I assume that when I write something to a large mailing
list, that I'm writing it for public consumption, now and in the future;
not to become somebody's private property that others aren't allowed to
share.

Jack wrote:
> A little history -- Back in the mid-70s, Lick (Licklider) had a vision
> of human-human communications which included the ability for
> "important" content to be copied to The Datacomputer, where it could
> be accessible, and even searchable, for posterity.

Where it was never backed up on ordinary media.  Its entire contents
would now fit on a single thumb-sized flash memory drive, or an even
smaller micro-SD card.  But instead, its entire contents are now
apparently either completely inaccessible, or permanently gone (see
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Datacomputer).  Posterity will not be
thanking the Datacomputer administrators for their trove of important
documents carefully husbanded from all over the ARPANET.

While it's fun chatting with each other on this list about our past
successes and failures, the more serious purpose that I thought we were
doing here was to draw out much material that was never formally
captured during the creation of the Internet and its predecessors.  Or
was hard to find among all the possible places one might look.  And to
record that valuable informal information "for posterity".

There is a Stanford (and many cooperating university) project making
local copies of scientific journals, so that when their online publisher
goes out of business, screws up, is bought by a scrooge, or falls off
the Internet, the university libraries and all their researchers still
have their locally stored copies of the journals that they paid dearly
for.  It's called LOCKSS, because:

  "Lots Of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe"

Right here, I'd like to thank Joe Touch for managing this mailing list,
because I know it's a thankless job.  And yet, where will posterity find
a copy of the mailing list archives?  On magtapes stored in the classic
offsite backup location (under Joe's sysadmin's bed)?

Explicitly setting a community expectation of public access and a public
right to share (e.g. a CC-BY license) would reduce the transaction costs
of cooperation, encouraging the creation of Lots Of Copies.  That would
make it far more likely that even ONE copy survives into the distant
future.

	John