Is The Web Like One Big BBS?
from the archive-this dept
A Salon article that starts out by comparing the "simplicity" with which Google restored the Usenet archives, with the difficulty some are having trying to bring back to life all sorts of old BBS materials. For those of you who weren't around online back then (or for you young ones, who weren't around at all back then), a lot of people got their first taste of the "online" world by dialing up to a BBS instead of "the internet". I remember playing games of "risk" on BBS's and downloading stupid funny text files. Some people are trying to save a lot of that stuff and archiving it. The problem is, that unlike Usenet, there generally was a single copy of most stuff - so if it's gone, it's gone. The article then shifts gear as it realizes that the web is (for the most part) just one big BBS. Unlike Usenet, which was copied to many servers, most stuff on the web only has one copy as well. So, much of what we read now may not be archived in any format in the future.
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