Web Heritage Could Be Lost

Squiff writes "The British Library warns us that 'The UK's online heritage could be lost forever if the government does not grant a "right to archive"' in the UK. Never mind the Wayback Machine, The British Library declares that 'the average life expectancy of a website was just 44 to 75 days, and suggested that at least 10% of all UK websites were either lost or replaced by new material every six months,' with the material within them being amongst the most revealing regarding the state of contemporary culture."

Re:Sadness

[Anonymusing]

Sadly, no, we actually did code animated ASCII by hand for display on terminals (or terminal windows). It was awful... especially at 300 baud, though even at 1200.

Re:why?

[rubycodez]

history is always distorted and often fabricated, and the ramblings of millions of manipulated ignoramuses won't help the matter

Re:Sadness

[BrokenHalo]

but really, there wasn't much information on the Web that was useful for non-scientists back then

Actually, that's only partly true. Project Gutenberg had a head-start (I think from 1971) on the internet. That and lots of other material was available via UUCP and various BBS sites.