Piracy for Preservation
2018-06-15 17:52:44.639013+02 by Dan Lyke 1 comments
Confessions of a disk cracker: The secrets of 4AM:
I mentioned this to Jason Scott, and he set me straight. Preservation is driven by pirates, who are driven by ego but constrained by the technical limitations of their era. In the 1980s, this meant storage space and network speed. Nobody got kudos for cracking “Irregular Spanish Verbs in the Future Tense,” no BBS would waste the hard drive space to host it, and no user would sacrifice their phone line to download it. So it never got preserved in any form.