[VonGuard]

In 2008 I found a parcel of bare EPROMs at a flea market container 27 games. 1 of those games was Cabbage Patch Kids Adventures in the Park, and it was spread across 12 chips, each one showing a progressive state of development across 9 months.

To my mind, this was the only known find of a vintage Atari 2600 game and its iterative development process. So, 30 years later, the only reason we had this snapshot is because someone found these chips and sold them at the flea.

The current state of digital preservation is abhorrent. Those roms would have taken up less than 1/4 of a 5.25" floppy, but the company behind them never thought to preserve that information or data.

Take2 Interactive republished BioShock in 2012. They couldn't find their source code. They didn't save it. They had to go machine to machine looking for it. The reissued game is not the same as the original.

As a society, we don't place any value on this stuff, but the potential value of it cannot be understood until the future has occurred. Letting it vanish is a disservice to the future. In the past, if a book was published, it wasn't going to vanish if the publisher went out of business, there would simply be no new copies.

In our digital online age, things vanish in seconds, days and hours. This is also a very different state of affairs. In the past we could not save everything, but everything didn't have a clock counting down from the end of the quarter over its head, counting the seconds until it is deleted.

The Library of Congress tries to save everything. Yes, libraries weed the stacks and choose items to host. This is due to space concerns: they can't host everything ever. Digitally, they can, and many host reams of microfilm and old newspapers because they can.

Libraries can, thanks to tech, now host every book ever, digitally, for very low costs. Copyright prevents that.

This is an unabated good. Leaving things behind and forgetting them is how you get Tulsa Oaklahoma, or the Armenian Genocide denials. We don't get to choose what the future finds interesting, and for the first time in history, we do not have to. Why in the every loving fuck would you worry about that?

Most likely, only for personal reasons. This is a humanity level problem. Your personal worries are irrelevant in 100 years when everyone who ever knew you is dead anyway. Geocities would be more interesting at that time, as a subject of study.

[NeedMoreTea]

Library of Congress, British Library, Bibliothèque Nationale etc choose to save everything they are mandated to, and a fair bit extra besides. That includes everything published. They don't save their water cooler chats, personal letters and everything sent by post, everything said on the phone or Facebook, etc.

The bar - perhaps found accidentally - seems quite important in deciding what must be archived, and what probably shouldn't.

[austinpow]

Archives of personal letters and ephemera, preserved in manuscript/special collections libraries, are incredibly important research sources. This often includes letters which were never meant to published. LOC had a project to preserve every tweet (published to the world) until a few years ago - who knows what tweets might be useful to future researchers?

[dmitriid]

And yet, hundreds of years later historians and linguists crave for letters, and post, and telegrams to get a glimpse of actual life outside official publications.

[NeedMoreTea]

Sure, and a hundred or more years later the family of the author, or relatives of the recipient can decide to release the family letters or telegram from WW1 or the US Civil War etc. That delay, usually at least until the correspondents have died, is important. The affair, the less than ideal belief, and all that other imperfect demonstration of humanity can no longer hurt or embarrass. It ceases to be private and personal and moves into the historic.

Releasing whilst the probably famous sender is alive is most often in the realms of to do damage, simply tasteless or paid for revelations in the gutter press.

[philpem]

Are these EPROMs archived or available to play anywhere? You've got me curious!

(amateur digital archivist and data recovery hw/sw dev here, I find this stuff fascinating!)

[braindeath]

> Leaving things behind and forgetting them is how you get Tulsa Oaklahoma, or the Armenian Genocide denials. We don't get to choose what the future finds interesting, and for the first time in history, we do not have to.

There is plenty of evidence for the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust, and 9/11. That doesn’t really stop deniers or conspiracy theorists. When it becomes politically advantageous, spreading misinformation becomes weaponized and mainstream. A bunch of nerds saving some ROM dumps isn’t going to really change that.

Like the library of Alexandria it’s also quite idealist to think archive.org will be around in 100 years or more. Not that we shouldn’t do it... but the future can be unkind to even all modern technology.