Category Archives: the state of digital decay

Digital.com purges DIGITAL

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while finally getting around to renaming aux to aux_ for my AltaVista based search engine, I noticed that the product link, http://www.altavista.software.digital.com/search/index.htm, is suddenly not found.

Well isn’t that a shame.

Ironically in a twist of fate, I found this article, “AltaVista Search Engine History Lesson For Internet Nerds“, with a nice overview of the amazing rise, and tragic neglectful decline of AltaVista. Then what struck me was this line:

Digital was the original owner of the domain that you’re reading now; www.digital.com. 

Wait!? What?!

Did digital.com just purge DIGITAL’s history?

Now I feel like an idiot for not having archived the archive. Always in motion is the past, it’s a shame that DEC’s pages had to be destroyed. History in digital form, especially Digital’s is always in motion and subject to $CURRENT_YEAR.

Sad.

December 14th, the end of Yahoo! groups

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Oddly enough these things have been going on since 2001, and have been curated gardens instead of the mess that is usenet (which is still operational!), or private mailing lists.

The 2 that Im on are the Hercules 390 group which moved to group.io. While other groups like H390-music (MUSIC/SP the Canadian mainframe OS with internet hooks) that sadly died along with it’s author, is probably going to be purged from the internet.

Along with other things like pdos, or even the board game Supremacy.

I don’t know what the answer is, other than to always have downloadable mailing list archives, and never trust a single place. So much stuff is deleted to save trivial amounts of space, and neither corporations nor government institutions can be trusted to maintain anything.

Thankfully there is archive.org, but who backs them up?