Friday, May 31, 2019

Reconstructing the early Internet and preserving everything coming in from now on!


 Early interesting Cars:
 1958 Fiat (Rose, of Roses are Read' sent me this befoe she passed)
But for today:
Son Jack tells me that some company is planning to build a HISTORY file of the internet even reconstruct most. If I can explain this, not everything stays on the internet forever. Some web sites fade due to ‘not upgrading’. URL addresses change. There are times I click on an address I have had for a long time and get some message like: This site is no longer available/active. (The basic idea is $, information is money!)

Anyway this group envisions storing EVERYTHING that passes thru the net, losing nothing. My thoughts: that is almost an impossibility. I am old enough to know when the IBM card was the ultimate in storage. Government checks were printed on IBM cards. My first Income Tax filing (1957) was on an IBM card. (Example: on the Ship, my intel file was 200,000 IBM cards.) Then slowly the ‘magnetic tapes’ were used. Those cards became two 1” magnetic tapes.  AH, what an innovation. 

Then the ball began to roll faster. Music was on tape, replacing records. Then 8 track players and movies, then the cassette, oh there was the floppy disk, then the CD. The DVD, the ball rolled faster and before long the tapes were no good, and unless someone transferred their VHS to CD it wasn’t long until there were no tape players/readers produced. The CD player is on the way out.

My point, no matter the media this company puts this info on, before long it will be unsearchable because our devices will change.

Some people might think they are storing their data in the ‘clouds’ but we are not. Investors have found a way to make money on Storage.  Huge buildings store more data than I know how to think, much less say. This guy typing can remember when a kilobyte was a HUGE number.  The first computers I repaired occupied 1200 sqft and had the capacity to store up to 26 Kilobytes!  WOW. Technical guys now store that on a spot the size of a pin head. Your cell phone stores thousands of times more than that.

I was surprised how much trouble I had (in my short stay in college) trying to understand the new technology that you cannot see with the eye. It is much easier for someone to accept the new technology if they have never seen the old analog or digital business computers.

Nite Shipslog

9 comments:

betty said...

That is so true in your last statement. It is easier for the young folks to do well with technology and accept it without much thought because that is all they know. It still amazes me how much information I can gather in just a blink of an eye when doing a web search. So quick to get so much data and then sometimes I complain that something is taking "forever" to load when it has only been a few seconds. We get spoiled I think with so much available literally at our fingertips.

betty

Glenda said...

Very interesting that the history is to be preserved; wonder what that encompasses? I am another throwback to the days prior to newer technology and struggle at times with a smart phone!

Mevely317 said...

Wow … this is mind-boggling! I still carry an old Walkman cassette player when I walk, but finding good audio books at the library is difficult. I tried using a CD player, but every time I turn it off the 'book' starts over from the beginning of the CD. Who needs that?

jadarnel27 said...

I'm not sure what Dad ("son Jack" to you :P) was referring to specifically, but this "Internet Archive" has been going on for quite a while! Whenever I come across one of those "dead links" that you mentioned, I can usually find it in the Archive - affectionately called "The Wayback Machine."

Here's a little bit of history on it: https://archive.org/about/

Chatty Crone said...

Okay - I don't want my information stored - but then I don't have anything to hide either.

Susan Kane said...

This was my thought also this past week. If an EMT hits the earth, suddenly we will all be gone as technology erases. Pen and paper still holds.

Lisa said...

If the internet data ever fades and things are lost, there will always be the slide searches at the public Libraries. Haha.

Nite
Lisa

I'm mostly known as 'MA' said...

In this day and age, it seems anything is possible. New advancements are made every day. I can't keep up with them and if you try to so, it does cost money. I guess I'll stay happy in my ignorance.

Dar said...

I'm with 'MA'....... I spent last winter transferring our family VCR tapes to DVD's....(is that right?), anyway, technology moves way too fast for me. I'm so tired of going ' fast,' that I could easily go off the grid and still be very happy. HA, that may happen!
loven'hugs from our slower north where our gardens still keep us fed and the land keeps us warm. We don't need much more than that. I'll also stay happy in my ignorance like 'MA.'