Reply 20 of 21, by Ozzuneoj
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pixel_workbench wrote on Yesterday, 16:14:What is it about the old sites that keeps us wanting to preserve them? Is it the information they contained and content like benchmark charts? Or is it nostalgia?
I'm sure there is enough old hardware among tech enthusiasts like ourselves that we can recreate the benchmarks. But without a central place to keep them, it would just be scattered among many forum posts or youtube videos. And it would not have the same article content, presented as if the hardware was just released, diving into all sorts of technical info that was cutting edge at the time.
It is definitely part nostalgia, but also just for the sake of historical preservation.
For me it's also sort of an "out of principle" kind of thing. To explain what I mean... if anything has or may have historical value, someone at some point will have to (possibly subconsciously) evaluate whether its historical value is great enough to be worth the effort and expense to preserve it.
As an example, there was a large, historically significant home built in the 1800s near my town. It was home to an American Civil War veteran who was part of a famous elite marksman unit, and who's family was among the pioneers who settled in this area in the early 1800s. They owned the entire area that now has a village on it. When the owners of the home could no longer sensibly take care of it about 5-10 years ago, the land was sold, the home was demolished and there is a dollar store there now (since it was a prime location for a business). The cost of preserving the home or even lifting it and moving it to another nearby property far outweighed the funds available or the value of it... apparently.
Now, compare that to something like Anandtech.com, TechReport, etc. Along with magazines (PC Gamer, PC Gaming World, PC Magazine, which all still exist because millions of copies were made), websites like these basically formed the computer enthusiast community, directed people to the products that started it all and set the course for the whole industry. If all of the tech reviews said "don't buy it" or "we preferred this other product", the product basically failed. Just look at all of the casualties of the late 90s to early 2000s in the video card and sound card markets. If these products had received lots of glowing reviews, they would have sold better and it could have changed the direction of things today.
GPU-wise, Nvidia and ATi (AMD) consistently put out the best products from 1999 on, and that is what we are left with today. If it weren't for these detailed, thorough and honest reviews, we'd all have been basing our decisions on whatever was written on the box, or maybe what one or two random other people said. This is why product boxes advertised these sites so prominently for so long, like on this beat up old Abit motherboard box I have:
The point is though... compared to indefinitely maintaining (and possibly having to lift and move) a huge old house that basically no one knew had any historical significance until they read about it somewhere, what is the cost\effort trade off of preserving any website, but more specifically one of these that millions of people are familiar with? For the owners, maybe making an extra copy of their last backup (before losing access to it...), putting it in a box and mailing it to an organization that will treat the data properly? Or, for historians\enthusiasts, maybe trying to track down owners of old sites to see if they have any such backups in storage anywhere? So... for this first step, it may be the cost of shipping, or maybe the cost of a drive or two. Basically, the cost may be near-zero relative to preserving other things.
Just making sure a copy exists in the hands of a third party before everyone involved is dead or senile is the most important step. Making it usable or accessible can come later when people have the time and possibly when the technology exists to run whole websites virtually (locally) for preservation purposes.
I have no idea how that 73GB copy of Anandtech was made, but it's possible that someone involved with the site helped with it. If that's the case, that's incredible and is exactly the kind of support the community needs. It's a shame that so many sites have been lost without this extra bit of effort being made though. I'm sure that for many sites this could, quite literally, be accomplished with a few clicks of a mouse, a box and some packing tape. Of course, there may be legal things involved as well. But... let's be realistic too. If compressed archival copies of these sites pop up on a historical preservation site a few years after the last ad-sense penny was squeezed out of a long-shut-down website, who is going to care? If it's on archive.org for decades and isn't being taken down during the peak of ad-revenue, it seems unlikely that anyone will care long after the monetization ship has sailed.