Building A Permanent Web

The Inventors of the Internet Are Trying to Build a Truly Permanent Web

Klint Finley | June 20, 2016

[Blogger's note: If you have not done so recently, check out the Way Back Machine (second link below). If a particular web site that you are not interested in has not been given a snapshot, you can request the Way Back Machine to take a snapshot right then and there.]
If you wanted to write a history of the Internet, one of the first things you would do is dig into the email archives of Vint Cerf. In 1973, he co-created the protocols that Internet servers use to communicate with each other without the need for any kind of centralized authority or control. He has spent the decades since shaping the Internet’s development, most recently as Google’s “chief Internet evangelist.”
Thankfully, Cerf says he has archived about 40 years of old email—a first-hand history of the Internet stretching back almost as far as the Internet itself. But you’d also have a pretty big problem: a whole lot of that email you just wouldn’t be able to open. The programs Cerf used to write those emails, and the formats in which they’re stored, just don’t work on any current computer you’d likely be using to try to read them.

Source: https://ipfs.io/

<more at http://www.wired.com/2016/06/inventors-internet-trying-build-truly-permanent-web/; related articles and links: https://archive.org/web/ (Way Back Machine. 487 billion web pages saved over time) and https://ipfs.io/ (IPFS is the Distributed Web. A peer-to-peer hypermedia protocol to make the web faster, safer, and more open)>