Remember comp.sources.hp48?

[EugeneNine]

The media might not last a long time but you can easily copy to new media at regular intervals. The movie loss issue would likely be due to no one copying to a newer media due to no one wanting to pay for that to happen. Though as someone else said is there anything recent worth keeping, most modern movies are political statements more than movies

I've had to do the same over the years. My stuff was on Commodore 5&1/4" floppies, then copied and converted to Amiga 3.5" floppies then PC 3.5" floppies then Microsoft word format then Libre/OpenOffice format.
I suffered losses along the way with stuff that I didn't find a way to convert at the time. Microsoft was especially bad at this, newer versions of their software would no support very old so if you skipped a couple versions you would suffer loss. Thats one of the reasons I learned to avoid Microsoft at all costs. The same issue as the movie example is going to affect businesses when they try to open their MS word 2003 document in MS Word 2023.

[pier4r]

(08-27-2017 02:26 PM)EugeneNine Wrote:  The media might not last a long time but you can easily copy to new media at regular intervals.

Yes but (a) easily is a big word. it depends on what you backup, otherwise backup strategies are not that trivial.
(b) it is still an additional work.

Quote:
when they try to open their MS word 2003 document in MS Word 2023.

Exactly this is the not easy issue. Depending on the format you should keep along the programs, that may not work or may get corrupted. Aside from plain text (that still may not work due to possible encoding changes) , I really don't know anything that is very stable on digital files.

Unless there is a backup software built to be used in the future and be compiled over and over. That's quite a project thought.

[EugeneNine]

Thats where open source software is a big help. Once I got away from MS products I've not had to convert anything. I made the conversion in 2002 so I've had 15 years of stability now.

The other issue with close source products is even if you keep the software it might still not run. Some old versions that need to contact a license or activation server for example.

[Dan]

Thanks pier4r, Helix and EugeneNine for your insight on the fragile nature of digital media.

Some thoughts on the points you have raised:

I have read that the Chinese knew of many mathematical results often attributed to the Babylonians and Greeks, but that these discoveries where lost because the Chinese recorded them on paper, which does not last as long as the tablets the Babylonians used.

We have seen the recent loss of historical artifacts in the Middle East, from the looting of the museum in Baghdad to the destruction of monuments in places like Palmyra, Syria.

Some people have warned of the possibility of chips being cleared by a burst of extreme solar activity. Imagine the loss of information and resulting chaos that would cause?

Didn't NASA lose the original footage of the moon landing, and Lockheed lose vital information on the tooling for the F-35 fighter jet? Sounds hard to imagine, but the points you have raised show how this can happen.

With regards to movies and politics, the priority for films to appear to be "inclusive" and the fear of offending some group has severely limited creativity, with directors forced to follow the formula set by studios.

[Chris Dreher]

(08-27-2017 04:15 PM)EugeneNine Wrote:  Thats where open source software is a big help. Once I got away from MS products I've not had to convert anything. I made the conversion in 2002 so I've had 15 years of stability now.

The other issue with close source products is even if you keep the software it might still not run. Some old versions that need to contact a license or activation server for example.

Related story (but a slight digression): I recently had to view some WRI files. These files are are from Write which was a simple word-processor that shipped built into Windows from 1.0 thru 3.1. However, it was superseded by WordPad in Windows 95. (more info)

The problem? WordPad is incompatible with WRI files and there are no handy utilities to convert WRI files... except that open source LibreOffice does. LibreOffice saved my bacon.

[Dieter]

(08-28-2017 06:07 AM)Chris Dreher Wrote:  The problem? WordPad is incompatible with WRI files and there are no handy utilities to convert WRI files... except that open source LibreOffice does. LibreOffice saved my bacon.

Ah, Windows Write. My first encounter with a WYSIWYG word processor in the days of Windows 3.0. But... at least up to Windows XP the Wordpad version that came with the OS was able to read Write files. So do several versions of Word, at least up to Word 2000. Not sure about the latest versions, though.

It wouldn't have been a good idea of Microsoft to switch to Wordpad without supporting the files of its direct predecessor. ;-)

Dieter

[EugeneNine]

Even wore was Microsoft Works, nothing else Microsoft at the same time could open works files so there was no migration path from word to word/office.

I also got screwed by MSAccess from v1-2, Visio after MS bought it and MS Money. I had to have two computers, one with MSmoney 98 and one with MSMoney 99 as money 99 decided my money 98 file couldn't be opened and MS tech support decided my 98 file must be corrupt (along with the multiple backups).

Another non MS was taxact. I burned the .exe on the backup cd as the data file but even installing the .exe an opening the data file it still forced me to start at the beginning, I couldn't just open up to my return.

Adobe's so called portable document format is not immune to it either. I have old pdf's crated by HP's scanners which throw errors in newer versions of adobe reader so you have to use open source tools to read them.

Similar happens on the windows OS, will the old program (ship for example) run on a later version of the OS? I ran into similar a bit ago when I found HP's program to convert HPGL to an image. I would have had to try the designed for windows 95 executable or just download the unix source, type make and use it since I run Linux. There are lots of odd file archiver/compression utilities like this our there in the net history. Lha for Amiga compiles and runs on linux just fine for example.

So when you copy your backups from older media to newer media you need to do a bare metal dr test where you put that new backup media in a fresh system and make sure you can read and open all the files.

[pier4r]

Meanwhile I ask:

- any decision about the "first torrent" of for hpcalc.org (and also comp.sys.hp48 for what I understood)?
- any idea to whom to ask for the MoHPC snapshot?

- I was also thinking, if we do a torrent, users may contribute from time to time downloading the torrent and making a new version containing other sites. Like someone having the site of the prof Rautenberg . So with some cooperation the data can slowly grow.

[EugeneNine]

Its available on archive.org but missing then bit Eric mentioned.

Eric, the display per month, did you write that yourself or is it something you downloaded?

[Eric Rechlin]

(08-28-2017 06:58 PM)pier4r Wrote:  - any decision about the "first torrent" of for hpcalc.org (and also comp.sys.hp48 for what I understood)?

I will probably make that in a few months. I have some other things I need to finish first.

(08-28-2017 06:58 PM)pier4r Wrote:  - I was also thinking, if we do a torrent, users may contribute from time to time downloading the torrent and making a new version containing other sites. Like someone having the site of the prof Rautenberg . So with some cooperation the data can slowly grow.

That would be best handled with multiple torrents, one for each site. I know the HP-41 site has one already. Because torrents become obsolete (and existing seeders can't seed anymore) when they are changed, unless I misunderstand how torrents work, the ideal situation would be to change the torrents rarely, which is easiest if they don't span multiple sites.

(08-28-2017 07:41 PM)EugeneNine Wrote:  Eric, the display per month, did you write that yourself or is it something you downloaded?

It's something I wrote myself.

[pier4r]

(08-29-2017 01:56 AM)Eric Rechlin Wrote:  That would be best handled with multiple torrents, one for each site. I know the HP-41 site has one already. Because torrents become obsolete (and existing seeders can't seed anymore) when they are changed, unless I misunderstand how torrents work, the ideal situation would be to change the torrents rarely, which is easiest if they don't span multiple sites.

Yes for me the idea is to keep "old torrents" as sort of versioning, and make new ones mostly with new data.

So it is like having:
- first torrent
- changes #1 (more or less, not too precise. Like collecting the section of sites that changed even in just one page)
- changes from #2
- changes from #3
etc...

But that will come, first we need a first torrent. Maybe I'll start with the comp.sys.hp48 file pointed above, although incomplete, better than nothing.

Then the rest will come.

[EugeneNine]

Saw this on reddit today https://www.vice.com/en/article/pky7km/u...zoo-online

Maybe the missing posts will show up in there. Posting so others interested can search as well.

Doesn't appear to go back far enough https://www.usenetarchives.com/threads.p...hp48&p=275

I've used the contact us to ask about older dates.

[Eric Rechlin]

Thanks. I contacted him. He doesn't have anything I am missing, but I have a lot he is missing (a couple hundred thousand posts), so I sent those to him to add to his archive.

[pier4r]

Nice work!

[Massimo Gnerucci]

Bookmarked, thanks!

[Sukiari]

Usenet is much better than forums. Not sure why everybody migrated away from it. I still use it.

[Bill Duncan]

(08-23-2017 10:32 PM)pier4r Wrote:  

(08-23-2017 09:03 PM)Massimo Gnerucci Wrote:  -cut-

Yes! I mentioned the modern era because a lot of times I see people sad for the library of Alexandria without realizing that we may lose many of those every year due to digital sources lost or inaccessible (or wiped out by mistake).

For example there was a nice awk site once, that slowly was collecting libraries made in awk. Gone.

Another example. hpcalc.org for some reason gets wiped (dunno, we get really unlucky). Is there anyone making mirrors of it? If not, it would be lost.

Hey Pier4r, I've been an AWK fan for a long time.
https://billduncan.org/awk-the-often-ign...-language/

What was the site you were looking for? Have you tried the wayback machine? https://archive.org/web/

[Bill Duncan]

Thank you Eric!

[pier4r]

(10-17-2020 11:15 PM)Bill Duncan Wrote:  Hey Pier4r, I've been an AWK fan for a long time.
https://billduncan.org/awk-the-often-ign...-language/

What was the site you were looking for? Have you tried the wayback machine? https://archive.org/web/

I guess I read your post. Yes the website has some pages on the web archive (awk.info ) but most of the discussion, code and so on is lost for what I could see.

You let me discover this: https://groups.google.com/g/comp.lang.awk that I didn't know. Maybe there there are bits of info too.

[Bill Duncan]

(10-19-2020 05:55 PM)pier4r Wrote:  

(10-17-2020 11:15 PM)Bill Duncan Wrote:  Hey Pier4r, I've been an AWK fan for a long time.
https://billduncan.org/awk-the-often-ign...-language/

What was the site you were looking for? Have you tried the wayback machine? https://archive.org/web/

I guess I read your post. Yes the website has some pages on the web archive (awk.info ) but most of the discussion, code and so on is lost for what I could see.

You let me discover this: https://groups.google.com/g/comp.lang.awk that I didn't know. Maybe there there are bits of info too.

Really sorry that awk.info went away. I used to point people to that site as it had some useful material. I did a binary search on the wayback machine, and it looks like May 3rd, 2016 was the last useful snapshot. I wonder if we could slowly trickle this and recreate it or at least the material somewhere.

https://web.archive.org/web/201605031800.../awk.info/

It seems dates after this they had trouble with it and gave up on it.

Thanks for reminding me about awk.info and the fact that many sites like this can go away so easily..

Cheers!