Wiped.

Rob on 1 June 2023 @ 12pm

I think this is actually a good point and example. Things like the Dennis Potter play, and Perry’s gnomes, we can probably imagine what they were like based on their later works. It’s a shame they are missing, but they are at least remembered. Even Tales of Mystery has left traces, in that it is there on a website with even all its episodes listed. It’s the vast quantity of work that was created, and not remembered, that leaves absolutely no trace of its existence, that saddens me more.

It’s not just TV of course. There’s a massive Digital Dark Ages of content that was created and published electronically in the early days of online computer services. From bulletin boards and various online communities, to more publisher focused services such as Prestel, so much has been lost. So many services were born, flourished briefly, and were shut down unceremoniously. Does anybody other than me remember a viewdata based information system in the window of a sea-front Tourist Information office in North Wales, accessible via a through-glass keypad, early 1990s? One tiny, tiny little service; somebody will have spent a lot of time producing the content, waxing lyrical over the local attractions, almost certainly created entirely manually, and it lives on only in my aging memory.

It’s not much better with t’internet, of course. So many websites have come and gone. So many decide to reorganise or delete old content; Link Rot is a terrible thing and bedevils any content more than a few months old. I love the Internet Archive of course, and the work they do, but even the Wayback Machine has limits. If a website was so small and obscure that it didn’t get linked to from just the right places, it was likely missed. If it was big and popular, it probably was too big to capture in its entirety at any given point. Or then you find old pages that need activeX or java to operate, so are missing so much content..

Sorry to ramble on so long. I don’t know what the answer is. I just know that the more I think about how much has already been lost, and how much is still being lost every single day, the sadder I feel. All that work, created with passion by innumerable, forgotten, writers, gone forever. Probably enjoyed by far more people than ever saw Tales of Mystery, too..

John J. Hoare on 3 June 2023 @ 12pm

I know exactly what you mean. And you’re absolutely right that the Internet Archive isn’t a solution for everything. So many sites I visit have issues there – even down to stupid things like missing stylesheets, let alone anything else. I’m not complaining, their work is essential, but it doesn’t absolve everybody else from doing something.

Fun fact: the first piece of Red Dwarf writing I ever did is lost. It was a silly little thing on the raw model footage on the Series 1 DVD, and was the thing which lead to me being part of Ganymede & Titan for so long. But I deleted it like a moron, and the Wayback Machine never captured it. It DID try to grab it YEARS later… when it was long gone, replaced with a holding page:

https://web.archive.org/web/20201022225205/http://www.ofla.info/reddwarf/models.html

Infuriating!

Jon Crossan on 4 June 2023 @ 11pm

My favourite example of digital rot is the flash-based website. The Internet Archive captures the webpage, but not the flash file, which you can’t play anyway because Flash is long deprecated. Yet, at the time, it seemed unimaginable that such sites would ever be inaccessible – especially when Flash felt like such a good experience over and above a standard HTML site.

One way I try and contribute, in my own small way, is to archive interesting things on archive.today, and making sure to do the same when I cite sources on Wikipedia. I always wonder how much poorly-sourced information on there is never removed, because the links have died and nobody bothers to remove it. Or, similarly, how much is deleted because it isn’t sourced, despite the sources at the time being entirely reliable.