Such a vast compilation of — stuff — that can just disappear with the flick of a switch or the crash of a hard drive, or just the caprice of a site owner or server admin. Oh, sure, there might be backups, caches of sites, and all that, but really, how likely is any given resource on the internet likely to still exist and be accessible in, say, ten years? Twenty years?
(Note that I'm not making any value judgements here. I don't think that something like a web page must be available 100 years from now - it may just be the nature of the thing that internet data is evanescent.) Turn the longevity question around - what's the oldest web page (or other internet resource location; FTP, Gopher, Archie - go wild) you can still make use of?
True, it's often difficult to know how old a web site is, if it's not explicitly dated. So far as I can tell, the first web server, ever, was a machine at CERN named nxoc01.cern.ch, and the first web site was http://nxoc01.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html. That site is gone now, but some history-minded people at the World Wide Web Consortium preserved it, and it's still available here. This museum display contains what the W3C say is the "least recently modified web page we know of", untouched since the misty depths of time, Tue, 13 Nov 1990 15:17:00 GMT (though there's no way to tell that from the page itself). Marvel at the crude scratchings, so like and yet so unlike us...
...what's the oldest web page (or other internet resource location; FTP, Gopher, Archie - go wild) you can still make use of?
Paris.org, added to the bookmarks in October 13, 1995. (The stupid thing is, for some reason the "added" date has changed to today. I don't know if they've changed this feature of the bookmarks since my bookmarks file was created! Fortunately the date in my Konqueror bookmarks is untouched and pure, because I don't like to use it.)
Other long-lived sites: UCR California Museum of Photography (same date) and the Missouri Botanical Garden, from Oct 16, 1995. Those are re-directed now, but they still work. That's just in a quick search. Note that the UCR page is named "netscape.html". Ha ha!
In fact, my most elderly links seem to date no further back than October 13, 1995. That must have been when I switched from Mosaic to Netscape. The account I was using then just went away last year, and I saved all the data. Those Mosaic bookmarks are probably reposing on a CD somewhere. If I still had the account, I'd check to see if Mosaic still works.
I tried a gopher site. Browser just said, "Huh?" Didn't even try to load the page. You can still ftp to labrea.stanford.edu, where the oldest directory comes up with 05/02/1994.
Posted by: Angie Schultz on February 2, 2005 10:13 AM
I figured that FTP might be the best bet; surely someone out there has a musty old FTP server with some musty old files on it. I haven't found anything obviously older than 1997 yet, though.
Posted by: David Fleck on February 5, 2005 06:54 AM