Memory of Internet

Context

According to the article Cost of Hard Drive Storage Space, Creative Computing magazine (December 1981, page 6) predicted that "the cost for 128 kilobytes of memory will fall below U$100 in the near future." At $100 for 128 kilobytes, the price of 1 gigabyte comes to $800,000. And, that is not adjusted for inflation. The cost of gigabytes of storage was prohibitively expensive for many corporations. (What is your flash drive size?)

So, when most "net news" (Usenet Newsgroups) site admins told users that articles would only be kept on site for one to two weeks, and that archives would keep them for months, I believed they would certainly be gone after a year or two. Little did I know that a few people were talking about archiving "important groups" even in the 80s. (That's right around when I started using the Internet as a graduate student – yeah, I'm that old.)

Usenet Archives

Try the following quick exercise:

1. Go to Google and search for "Zork" (an ancient computer game)
2. At the top, where you can change your search to "images", "videos",... select the drop-down labeled "more". Then select "Groups".
3. Next to the "Search" button, select "Advanced search".
4. In the "Message Dates" area, change "Return messages posted between" to 1 Jan 1981 to 31 Jan 1981.
5. Click the "Advanced search" button.

This should result in one post, recreated here:

Question about Dungeon game on the PDP

 What systems did the Infocom game Dungeon/Zork run on? PDP-10? PDP-11?

 I don't recall a version of "Advent" (Colossal Caves) either, for
 anything other than the PDP-10 or 11. I don't recall any of these games
 being ported to the PDP-8 system.

 Any ideas as to why? Didn't the PDP-8 have at least 6 KB of core
 memory?

 Paul

Now that's important stuff to archive! The fact is, just about anything you put on the Internet is here to stay. Poor Paul's question about why games aren't available on a particular platform (PDP-8) was posted over thirty years ago!

Today we might think that tweets (twitter messages) are ephemeral. Not so. Tweets are to be made part of the US National Archives as part of their "web capture project". A common pastime today is genealogy, in the future??? Your (grand)kids may be researching your tweets.

Rather than lecture on the long memory of computers (especially when buying memory is so cheap), I'll point you to a reasonable article that you can peruse, if you choose: Protect Your Privacy on Facebook and Twitter, By Tony Bradley, PCWorld (Sep 24, 2009 9:00 pm).