Why there’s so little left of the early internet

Re:Why there’s so little left of the early internet by Tepix on Wednesday April 03, 2019 @09:08AM (#19562968)

The answer is clear: It takes an effort to publish something on the internet. Companies and other organisations disappear and their web presence disappears with them. It takes an extra effort to create a copy. The dark web - the parts of the web that aren't easily accessible because they consist of databases, paid access areas or perhaps simply facebook posts not published as "public" - remains hidden and inaccessible to preservation efforts.

There's also the problem of consuming old internet content. Do you still have a gopher client? Will old web pages look the same in your browser as they did in 1995? Flash will no longer work (hooray?).

On the other hand books, photographs and magazines stick around until you throw them away and we have public institutions that are dedicated to their preservation.

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Re:Why there’s so little left of the early internet by sebastiaand on Wednesday April 03, 2019 @12:30PM (#19564739)

> Do you still have a gopher client?

This is a big problem. Firefox dropped Gopher and Chrome never supported it. Most Gopher users, presumably, use a Gopher web proxy.

For fun I recently built a Gopher web client, implementing the entire protocol in a single page app (literally a single HTML file, no frameworks or dependencies). It supports most documented file formats including "modern" extras like video and audio.

Gopher client: - https://gopher.commons.host

Source code: - https://gitlab.com/commonshost/gaufre

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Re:Why there’s so little left of the early internet by badsectoracula on Wednesday April 03, 2019 @09:41AM (#19563198)

FWIW old web pages do look the same as they did in 1995, with the exception of the default background color changing from silver to white at some point for some reason. But, at least under Windows, the default fonts, colors, spacing, etc are 99% the same.

Flash also works if you are using Chrome. Sadly, Firefox does not support Flash plugin anymore (and i say sadly because just yesterday i was trying to find some files from an old site that was made using Flash and i had to use Chrome just for that).

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Re:Why there’s so little left of the early internet by icebraining on Wednesday April 03, 2019 @11:45AM (#19564308)

Firefox still supports Flash, it just doesn't bundle it, unlike Chrome - you have to install the plugin manually. They're only slowly deprecating it starting on FF 69 (the "always activate" option will disappear, so users will have to click to activate it every time: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1519434)

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Re:Why there’s so little left of the early internet by int_19h on Wednesday April 03, 2019 @06:23PM (#19567744)

For archival purposes, we might as well just archive the software that was used to read it. In fact, we already do to some extent - for example, Debian archives package repos for all its releases, so you can still get Potato (2000) up and running.

There's also the question of hardware, but so long as we have at least one up-to-date PC emulator, we have an answer to that. It might become more of a challenge going forward, as mainstream emulators drop BIOS support and other legacy parts of the platform; but even then there's stuff like PCem.

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