Online Shopping in the 1950s

Re:Online Shopping in the 1950s by salmonet on Thursday January 14, 2016 @11:58AM (#10902589)

>There’s little to no information on the internet about it or its inventor, except for these photographs for a LIFE magazine article which may never have been published.

It's crazy to me that there is no record of this beyond these photographs considering how many people must have known the inventor, used this, or had friends that did, but then again I haven't spent much time in the pre-internet world. People looking back on today's daily life 65 years from now will have a lot of information.

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Re:Online Shopping in the 1950s by 5ilv3r on Thursday January 14, 2016 @12:38PM (#10902884)

"will have a lot of information."

I don't think they will. Too much data about our lives is locked up and lost by online communities falling apart. Anyone who invested a significant amount of time in myspace probably has nothing to show for that period of their lives, and I worry that the new trend of lifelong facebook use will make that even worse.

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Re:Online Shopping in the 1950s by eropple on Thursday January 14, 2016 @02:55PM (#10903974)

`salmonet said nothing about individual lives in his post. Facebook disappearing tomorrow wouldn't mean that historians a hundred years from now couldn't get an extremely clear view of what life today is like in aggregate.

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Re:Online Shopping in the 1950s by bkeroack on Thursday January 14, 2016 @03:05PM (#10904034)

Have any old Zip disks laying around (or did you ever)? How accessible are the contents to you today?

Now imagine trying to get that data 150 years from now.

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Re:Online Shopping in the 1950s by steven777400 on Thursday January 14, 2016 @03:33PM (#10904246)

Even having the drives may not mitigate issues of that kind. A variety of articles [0] describe unexpectedly (well, to consumers at least) short lifespans on CD-Rs. Lots of CD drives are still around, but you might be unpleasently surprised if you put in a 15 year old CD-R that's been sitting on the shelf.

[0] Google search: burned cd lifespan

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Re:Online Shopping in the 1950s by eropple on Thursday January 14, 2016 @08:48PM (#10906505)

> Have any old Zip disks laying around (or did you ever)?

Nope. Too young for Zip disks. My data's on redundant hard drives in my NAS and has a cloud backup as the braces to that NAS's belt.

> Now imagine trying to get that data 150 years from now.

I have a remarkable amount of trust and faith in the Internet Archive to continue being excellent at their jobs or others to pick up the slack. This thread reminded me about a project I wanted to bounce off of those folks, too...BRB.

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Re:Online Shopping in the 1950s by greglindahl on Thursday January 14, 2016 @11:00PM (#10907086)

The way to save bits is to copy them onto new media every few years. That's what the Internet Archive does -- we're currently phasing out 2 terabyte disks for 8's.

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Re:Online Shopping in the 1950s by 0xdada on Thursday January 14, 2016 @03:04PM (#10904024)

There's an online game from 2001 that I can't find any information on. I went as far as contacting the trademark owners and even they don't have anything, any source code, any images. Pre-internet and pre-google will probably mean the same soon.

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Re:Online Shopping in the 1950s by SixSigma on Thursday January 14, 2016 @04:05PM (#10904472)

I've got to ask: which game ?

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Re:Online Shopping in the 1950s by 0xdada on Sunday January 17, 2016 @02:20AM (#10918675)

It was a web-based game in Hungary called Virtual Box.

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Re:Online Shopping in the 1950s by ghaff on Thursday January 14, 2016 @03:54PM (#10904411)

"Little to no information on the internet" I suspect that if one were sufficiently motivated to do offline research, you could probably find at least some information. If this was notable enough to attract a LIFE photographer--whether or not the article was actually published--I'm pretty sure there would be newspaper articles, etc. about it.

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Re:Online Shopping in the 1950s by obilgic on Thursday January 14, 2016 @01:45PM (#10903427)

soon pre-internet will feel like pre-writing.

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