Why is this article hosted on github? Obviously it wasn't created there as it was written in 1996. Are all the message boards and forums where this type of material was likely posted really defunct or unusable now? Do we now need to rely on enterprising internet historians to find gems on older platforms just to copy them to the newer platforms? Will Github be around in 20 years? Will the next historian have to unearth it from github just to copy it to the next platform?
That does seem to be the case here. I had re-hosted these .plan files from a website – which has removed them – that had re-hosted them from Shacknews – which had also removed them.
GitHub seemed like a quirk-and-dirty way to re-host these while giving others an easy way of duplicating the original files so they’re less likely to be lost in the ether.
Why not? While this is a bit of an exception, given the prominence of the author, most internet content is always at risk of being wiped away from the record. Let a thousand mirrors bloom.
