Re: USENET on a tape

[Alexander Chislenko <sasha@cs.umb.edu>]

   Jeremy Porter writes:
 
> ... Usenet traffic being rated at some 21gigabytes a year
> (traffic through UUnet) considering the low information value
> of the vast majority of it, no one will be interested in storing it.
 
   Wait a minute...
   How much would it cost to store all this info?
a few hundred thousand dollars a year?
 
   This seems to be the cheapest (per byte) archiving opportunity in
the history of civilization; storage cost is many orders of magnitude
lower than the efforts spent creating this info.
   Many times as much is spent on archaeological/historical research
projects that 1) can wait and 2) get much, much, much less information,
while the hugest ever information traffic disappears without a trace.
 
   This is unbelievable!
 
   Apart from regular merits of any archive and far-fetching perspectives
of Internet archives becoming a part of global intelligence, this traffic
can be invaluable for studies of evolution of languages and subcultures,
development of particular concepts, detailed biographical material (there
are many historical figures whose biographical data collection took a lot
more resources than is needed to store all net traffic), and so much more...
 
   In general, I would expect that if people spent a 1000 dollars worth
of efforts to write messages, it should be worth it to spend another penny
to store them forever...
 
   It's likely, though, that some agencies do keep full net archives;
if even not, much of the traffic may be recoverable from partial archives
scattered all over the world; the attempt will sure be made some day - but
at what cost?
 
> In usenet no one can hear you scream...
 
:-(
 
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|  Alexander Chislenko | sasha@cs.umb.edu | Cambridge, MA  |  (617) 864-3382 |
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