The OED can not only survive the internet; it will flourish on the internet. We can incorporate the entire thing into Wiktionary, which, as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16461656 points out, is already in some ways more comprehensive and reliable. Unfortunately, for copyright reasons, we have to go back to its first edition, and even the last volume of the first edition might still be in copyright.

I announced the project at https://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg001..., bought a copy of the dictionary, and spent a bunch of nights at the archive scanning its volumes. https://old.datahub.io/dataset/oed talks a bit about the available data halfway through the project. I did eventually scan the whole thing, and since then other people have contributed other scans. So far nobody has OCRed it and imported it wholesale into Wiktionary.

At some point I hacked together a web service that would show you the page image for a given word (perhaps after a few tries), but I don't have it running now. https://archive.org/details/oed11_201407 seems to be a downloadable program that does something similar.

It's really unfortunate that the past century of work at the Oxford University Press will be lost and have to be redone. Such is the price of copyright.