Internet has no history
With the current landscape of Internet shaped in the way currently we see, we will be losing part of important history. Think that archive.org will save the day? Nah. They are willing to eliminate any web site information upon request. There has been talk about archive.org removing certain Microsoft web pages after Microsoft request. Not to mention that archive.org isn’t a complete archive of all web sites as well.
Recently I came across a link introducing a hacking tool trying to pretend as Windows XP login screen. Just few days after I saw the page, it was gone. As if the tool has never existed. Indeed, the page author must have been under pressure, and it’s not ethical (and in some countries illegal) to publicize such tool. However, it’s still a part of internet. Be it “bad” or “good” (evilness and goodness are only defined by humans anyway), they are still part of internet history. What we see is, only the part deemed “good” are recorded into history. Nobody ever saw the dark side, the underground part of internet. They don’t even know such thing existed. That’s the same as teachers telling children European Dark Ages have never existed, nobody knows what happened in that era. Only brilliant emperors are known on this planet. Isn’t that absurd?
I would say, the speed of information disappearance is proportional to how fast internet traffic concentrates in big nodes (think about Facebook, Google, Yahoo and all the famous names). That doesn’t mean punch card and Apple ][ will ever be forgotten, they are legendary. Instead, things like early DOS/Windows series, BeOS, OS/2, Atari and all other less known systems should belong to the forgotten history, maybe within 10 or 20 years. As well as all non-famous tools.
What can we do? Not much, unfortunately. Unlike big names such as Google, most people have limited resources for archiving (maybe a few hard drives, but that’s it). Besides, the volatility and instability of storage (CD, DVD, hard drive, whatever) only makes the problem more serious. Probably most of us won’t be able to get data back from, say, 6 years ago. But for more important stuff useful for many people (such as netcat for Windows), the situation is sad.