Ask HN: What to do with text from old, unarchived, online forums?
I have a stack of printouts of various discussion forums from between 1991-4. Mostly chatter, but several interview transcriptions, news reports, and magazine articles that no longer appear to be online.
They vary from Billboard charts, to Associated Press reports on Michael Jackson's wealth, and Debbie Gibson discussion groups!
Are they useful/interesting as pieces of Internet history?
Are the copyright/privacy issues too onerous to scan/publish?
Do I simply send a box of paper to archive.org to worry about?
111 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 173 ms ] threadthe well has been around since the mid 80s. It was a bbs and then a few other weird things until it became a 'somewhat standard' web forum in the mid 90s -- but if I remember right when it transitioned from BBS there was an effort to move the conversations over to the web forum.
delphi forums too, which similar to the well has been through a few incarnations.
I grew up on AOL 2.5 and the hacking/warez scene there. So many good times with 1IM punters, cchats, scrolling, and phishing OH and INT accounts.
BUT... in a more colloquial sense of how "web" might be used retrospectively, as sort of a loose synonym for "online", then absolutely. Going back well into the 1980's, and then into the 1990's, we had all sorts of online services, including discussion forums. There were the big services like Compuserve, The Well, AOL, Delphi, GEnie, Prodigy, etc. And then there were individual small dial-up BBS's[2] by the bushel-load.
At their peak there were many thousands of them in the US alone. There were entire magazines printed and distributed that were effectively nothing but lists of dial-up numbers for BBS's, and magazines like Computer Shopper had big sections dedicated to listing those as well.
And then there was, as you mention, Usenet.
So yeah, even back in 1991, there were plenty of forums that might not have strictly been part of "the web", but that someone in contemporary times might casually describe as a "web forum".
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulletin_board_system
That's what I would do, although I'd probably scan it for them, or at least would send an email first. Also, good on you for trying to preserve early internet history. You have my admiration.
https://help.archive.org/help/frequently-asked-questions/
Then repost on related public-facing online forums or a free wordpress site or upload to archive.org
Taking a Photos of every print out from our Phone? That is 1000s of photos each needing to snap and focus.
Not everyone has a scanner, and not every scanner has automated tray feed. And even if they do the quality of their scan are really low by default.
I have similar question with Business Cards as well. I have hundreds if not thousands of them. But with no way to automatically archive them.
(no affiliation, just a customer)
One general piece of advice is that before you go crazy, think about what you really care about saving. There’s a cost to scanning of course. There’s also a cost to metadata and other cataloging so that you can actually find what you’ve scanned.
For photos everything is in Lightroom with at least a modicum of organization. When my dad decided he’d like a digital picture frame of older family pics it literally took me about 30 minutes to pull together.
Photos of a historically interesting event? Sure. But for old family pics I’m happy to have hundreds of curated photos of mostly people and call it a day.
What was the purpose of printing out online discussions? Was it to read them while not at the computer? Was it to physically archive them?
They did, but FWIW, they were very small and fairly expensive compared to contemporary times. The attitude towards using disk space was a bit different back then, because it was a much scarcer and more valuable resource.
Absolutely. Back in that era printing things was just "what you did" if you wanted some combination of permanent / portable / offline accessible. FSM only knows how many trees I am responsible for killing back in the day, printing stuff that I would never bother printing now. But over time we got more comfortable with not needing everything on paper, and so now...
> It still boggles my mind a bit when people say they don’t have a printer at home
... I am one of those people. I don't own a printer and rarely print anything. On the infrequent occasions when I do want paper copy of something, I just send it to a nearby Fedex Store or UPS Store and have it printed there.
I DID give up on quality inkjet photo printers. That I’ll just send out to some online printer. Which I rarely do; I only have so much wall space.
But yeah, for people who are much further away from a printing location or who print more frequently, it would definitely still make sense to have a home printer.
I mean, that's more than enough for text downloaded from a usenet group. Printing that much plaintext out would be something.
In mid-late 90s central Texas, a well-off family might have had one PC and a second phone line shared between Internet access and the kids, as well as a dot matrix printer or even an inkjet (ink was a LOT cheaper back then), but only the most indulged (or nerdy, spending their savings on that instead of driving expenses) kids would have had their own PCs.
Saving locally to a desktop computer surely existed back then, I even did it myself sometimes.
I was just pointing out that saving locally (the original question) has nothing to do with googling about laptops and smartphones (the condescending reply).
I accessed Usenet from my university, printed it very cheaply, and brought it home.
My home PC didn't have any internet connection until a couple of years later when I could afford a 9600bps modem.
As to diskdrives, when I started our uni-workstations could'nt read a dos/win3.1 disk
Doing a lot of reading on that was rough on the eyes and you were scrolling constantly. I printed a lot back then.
Take for example the fact that (testing with a 150kb block of lorem ipsum text) you could easily squeeze the text capacity of a 3.5mm floppy into around 20 pages of physical text. 10 sheets of double-side printed paper and some ink might well have been cheaper than the floppy it would be intended to replace.
Unfortunately I was unable to find any good resources on the cost-per-page of printing back in the day. So I can't really put hard numbers to this. Printing is incredibly cheap now (for text at least, printing photos uses so much ink) and I can't imagine it was all that more expensive back when most work people did still relied on printing off documents and hand signing them. (physical bill printing, checks, physical contract signing, etc.)
Of course this is all speculation on my part, I was too young to care about money and how much things cost back when the my household had floppy disks and printed things off regularly. If someone has a better memory of the time I would really be interested to hear from someone who did pay attention to those things.
Early laser printers were very expensive for the printer but the toner was relatively cheap, and a ream of paper wasn't that expensive, either.
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/10
Heck, even if you could save it locally, you might have only had a 500MB hard drive, it seems weird now because with TB drives, unless you are saving games/media, you have almost unlimited storage.
I mean that was already a massive amount of storage for plain text.
> you could easily download an entire floppy disk in a minute or two
And how does printing it on paper help with that? If anything, switching out the floppies and carrying them home is faster and easier than with hundreds (or thousands) of pages.
But I get your overall point of transferring the content home.
We were all used to reading text on paper in a much nicer format back then.
The typical text/graphic display of the day was about 36" * 24" and delivered daily on your doorstep for about $0.50 plus tip.
Printout wasn't as nice, but you could mark it up, and scroll was intuitive, as was copy and paste.
They are overpriced, but try reading a newspaper once... It's a completely different experience. You have no idea how nice it felt to have the Sunday newspaper and time to soak it in.
It was well written, and had no spam in it.
Today is garbage. Best to use site search on individual known websites.
I mean.... likely more than "a bit" younger :)
1. Computer not always available. A lot of the time it could be a "Family Computer". Not "Personal Computer".
2. There were far more detailed discussions than today, but computer are not portable so you want to read it may be while you are in bed.
3. Access information has a cost. Not only does it take time on a dial up modem. Transfer ( In terms of Data / bytes ) isn't free and depending on settings / locations / plan you could be paying for it per visit.
That is from someone who used to print a lot of internet out in university.
I have a couple of GameFAQs discussions and cheat lists for various PS2/GameCube games from the early 2000s. They're stowed in a folder because it was a hassle to run between the family room and my bedroom when referencing.
Also, for the longest time, a household shared a single computer. So printing off the pages meant I didn't need to compete between family members for computer use.
Edit: A friend just reminded me of navigating in the passenger seat with a stack of Mapquest prints.
Edit-2: If anyone wants to relive this in the modern world, print to PDF blog posts, news articles, etc., and store them on your Kindle (or equivalent). You'll notice you'll comprehend the article way better than on your phone or laptop.
Of course you could save pages, or even print to PDF (after installing ghostscript). But that's nowhere near as comfortable to read
So while I understand the need for printing out stuff back then, I'm a bit puzzled why someone would print out forum discussions per se.
Alternatively, you could print them out.
So printing out the discussion allowed you to learn how to accomplish certain things or unlock certain items doing weird gamepad movement, even if it was false.
See Mew in Pokemon Y/B/R and the SS Anne truck: https://gaming-urban-legends.fandom.com/wiki/Mew_Under_the_T...
All you need is some troll posting how it worked for them, and you'd print out their instructions along with someone else who said they got it working the same way with a +1 step, and you're printing off the entire discussion, trying to get a Mew before school the next day to no avail.
My Dad wasn't going to let me hogging the family computer for hours playing on my gameboy for no reason.
That's quite specific, but just one example. I think we could imagine a scenario where you might have printed any instructional thread. The interview transcriptions mentioned could've been for offline interview prep.
Sometimes I'd also bring it along as reading material in a car ride etc...
There were also some games that didn't cope well with switching between fullscreen and desktop, so printed material helped there too!
https://faqs.neoseeker.com/Games/PC/doom.txt
Primarily to read them offline. These messages were usually part of usenet, or in emails lists, or held on (remote) servces like Mono at Imperial. You could read them on the HP-UX systems, via a dumb terminal, which were connected to the Internet, but not connected to a PC with a disk drive. (Well, there were a few PCs and Mac classics around, but not enough for everyone and - as an Amiga fan - there wasn't yet CrossDos to let me use compatible disks.)
Some items, like early drafts of the Star Wars scripts, I did print for archival purposes as I (foolishly) thought that they'd be spotted and taken down by the copyright police, and lost forever!
Spoiler alert: This was all around 1991
Typically an internet user would dial out with their physical phone line which was often also their home phone line (no mobile data).
A lot of internet service providers back then charged by the minute or hour to connect.
Collecting posts could let you collect more to read them offline.
Printing in general was more common (easy way to share with ppl who weren’t online) and a better reading experience than reading them on screen because the screen resolutions were still pretty low.
Imagine the pyramid: the amount of time user was interactively connected to some network service — the amount of time user was in front of (any) computer system — the rest of life activities.
Fully featured mail clients, news clients, FidoNet clients had many options to quickly mark message chains for download or export, and deal with them offline later. You could even dump all those updates to a floppy, give it to a modem-less user, then transfer replies for upload through the same “floppynet”. Communities also collected all kinds of FAQs for users to grab first and study offline before wasting time.
Similar solutions were needed for periods spent away from keyboard. If you were on a trip in a different city, you would have all the directions printed or simply written down instead of taking the computer with you.
Some documents were simply more usable when printed than when displayed screen-by-screen in text mode or low resolution. Some services/protocols did not implement live text search, and a glance at paper copy could be easier and faster. Later example of server-side state updates over slow channel is the existence of dedicated normal and print modes in old forum software. By default, a small number of messages is shown on each page to prevent long wait times for each page on dial-up. People who are sure they want to save or print the whole thread can choose much longer page that lacks online-oriented design features.
Reading at the desk was ok, but your CRT monitor was often low res and somewhat flickery (depending how sensitive to that you are).
Laptops (once they existed) had hilariously short battery life and dismal lcd based screens. I wouldn't recommend it.
I think I stopped printing stuff out pretty much exactly when laptops got good enough to use instead.
well, not quite. soon.
models gotta feed.
Once scanned, derive operations will take care of OCR and generating relevant metadata from the artifacts. If there are any issues (copyright, etc) preventing these items from being public, they'll be made private by patron services.
(no affiliation with the Archive, just a volunteer)
https://github.com/jjjake/internetarchive might be helpful
If you have an artifact in digital format already, you can self serve and don't need my help. Patron services at the org can provide guidance if you are unsure of item value, upload mechanics, collections, metadata, etc.
FWIW, on most other systems I'm contactable via @marquisdegeek
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38882079
Either use an all in one printer or scanner with an automatic document feeder, or send that box to a service to scan.
Once digitized there are a lot more places interested in it
He won't ask but I will: please consider donating directly to Jason:
> Venmo is @textfiles and jason@textfiles.com is Paypal
A lot of them are on waybackmachine, but finding out about them is often the hard part.
I created a chan discussion board on my own imageboard (http://13channel.crabdance.com/chan/index.html) to research this kind of stuff - but only for chans specifically.
Dear Google, you could have added ads to those old results to justify keeping them up, but you failed because you're more interested in locking things down than actually building up an open web.
Now there's decades worth of old usenet content probably gone, my understanding is a lot of it was donated by old usenet providers that shut down or just couldnt keep hosting really old but historic texts for whatever reason.
The fundamental disconnect you guys have is this: in order to print something out, it needs to be stored somewhere first. So you indeed downloaded a text file in order to print it. Surely you saved it somewhere, at least in RAM if not permanent storage. Otherwise the printout wouldn't happen.
The sorts of things that I used the printer for were school reports and papers, and especially Print Shop style banners. It was really fun to run off a larger-than-life "HAPPY BIRTHDAY" sign that was basically professional DTP style with good fonts, graphics and the whole bit.
At school the chief use of the Line Printers was for large-format ASCII art. We'd take some GIFS of rather prurient pin-up shots, or anime or just some interesting subject, and run it through an ASCII art generator, then print out something suitable for covering an entire wall. Sometimes we'd even print out the Pascal code we were working on, so we could mark it up and sort of edit it offline. But that was the exception to prove the rule.
To this day, many academics still print tons of papers out to read. I'm sure there are other niches where it is still considered normal to print - even though sure, you could argue that an iPad Pro + Pencil is advantageous if for no other reason than physical space.
edit: Could've made my point a bit better. I get where you are coming from. I just mean that at the time, I think more people would find it crazy to stock pile CDs with text files vs printouts