←back to thread

Digital Archivists: Protecting Public Data from Erasure

(spectrum.ieee.org)
206 points rbanffy | 1 comments | 02 Apr 25 16:03 UTC | HN request time: 0.222s | source
Show context
Teever ◴[02 Apr 25 17:08 UTC] No.43558875[source]▶
I made this related submission[0] recently but it was flagged.

This stuff is very important to talk about so I hope that this submission by rbanffy isn't also flagged.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43543075

replies(2): >>43558949 #>>43559085 #
donnachangstein ◴[02 Apr 25 17:26 UTC] No.43559085[source]▶
No it isn't. It's merely a cause du jour for data hoarders to justify their hobby in light of this Chicken Little hysteria.

30 years ago it was thought collecting every issue of magazines like TV Guide was important. No one even knows what that is anymore.

No one is ever going to look at 99% of this data. In the meantime, send more hard drives for my NAS!!

replies(5): >>43559154 #>>43559333 #>>43559564 #>>43561355 #>>43562315 #
dreamworld ◴[02 Apr 25 17:35 UTC] No.43559154[source]▶
It might be of some interest to cultural historians in the future. But I think it makes more sense to take sample+curated data. But in any case if we can afford it, eh why not.
replies(1): >>43559949 #
rbanffy ◴[02 Apr 25 18:40 UTC] No.43559949[source]▶
We don't know now what to curate for the future. We should preserve as much of everything we can - we don't know what will be important in 50, or 500 years.

Case in point: retrocomputing is my hobby. I buy, restore, preserve, and use old computers. Most of them are home computers, because business computers go directly from the office to the recycling facility or the landfill. Unless someone deliberately preserved, say, a Burroughs B-25 desktop, or the similar from Data General, they are gone.

replies(1): >>43560413 #
Suppafly ◴[02 Apr 25 19:15 UTC] No.43560413[source]▶
My son is into retrocomputing, mostly using older hardware I have from when I was younger, and we have a stack of old compaq desktops where you can't access the bios because it requires a specific floppy that is nearly impossible to find online. This is 486/pentium era stuff, the older stuff is even harder to find.
replies(1): >>43567798 #
1. rbanffy ◴[03 Apr 25 10:57 UTC] No.43567798[source]▶
I've been looking for a DEC terminal with Sixel, Tektronix and ReGIS graphics for a while, with zero success. They weren't rare at all - they were a massive success, and, yet, it seems almost all ended up in a recycling facility or an e-waste dumpster. Many other terminals emulated them and expanded on their feature set.