h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Welcome back, George. It's great to see you again.

I really hope that this is a prelude to a really terrific site.

Happy 4th of July, George.

Glad you thought to give us one more check, George!

Welcome back, George!

Motto: The future. It lies ahead of us.

I thought the motto was: The Future Begins Tomorrow

Or was the motto from Yoyodyne from Buckaroo Banzai?

History is-a made at night. Character is what you are in the dark.

The Future, that's where it's at

Where are we going?

Planet 10.

When?

Real soon.

What do we want, alabaster, when do we want it, at about tea time...

WhiteCamry here. It's been three weeks; I can sign in but I can't access threads. How do I access them?

What's the problem, WhiteCamry? You obviously accessed this thread, so what happens when you try to access other threads?

Do you mean here on h2g2 or on other DNA sites? I notice this is your first message on h2g2. I'll be along to your PS in a minute to greet you properly.

they seem to have wandered over from 606, I wonder if the threads he is talking about have been closed

I see that the 606 website has been closed down. That's probably what he's talking about.

The 606 forum closed on 31 May 2011.

from 606?

That is horribly sad. I just want to them all.

Internet websites are turning out to be more ephemeral than some people expected they'd be. Who'd have thought it? Remember, we live in a world where the most ephemeral forums we were used to pre-Internet were newspapers. Yet, people found ways of saving archival copies of newspapers, so that researchers can still do things like find uses of the word "okay" in microform or digital copies of some Boston newspaper from 1844. Paper copies Court documents from 16th- century England are still tucked away somewhere; somebody found a deposition by William Shakespeare regarding some event at a rooming-housei n London where he happened to be living.

So, we can still know a lot about what people were writing about 400 years ago, but your posts from four years ago on the BBC's 606 forum are gone forever, unless somebody saved some of them in another spot on the Internet.

Then there's email. As a former municipal worker, I well know that any email I sent as a public employee is a public document, and will likely be saved till the next ice age somewhere. However, that Yahoo
email account your aunt Phoebe opened two months ago but only accessed the day she opened it is closed now because of extended lack of use.

I think the 606 forum posts are visible, for the moment. You just can't make any new ones. How long they'll be kept is another matter.

Paul, this is a matter that troubles me greatly - the huge loss of records for future historians. I can imagine a time in the not too distant future when people say "What happened with these guys? Why did they suddenly stop recording their lives? What kind of catastrophe occurred at the end of the 20th Century? From the 21st Century onwards is an information black hole. We know nothing about that time."

The Internet is the one of the greatest inventions in the history of mankind, but at present we have no idea of the consequences of how we are using it. Electronic data backup is a complete waste of time. Today we cannot even read data recorded onto 8" floppy disks from less than 25 years ago, let alone 1,000 years. Most people under that age (25) would probably ask "What is a floppy disk anyway?"

As a music historian, paper documents are my bread and butter. Imagine if all of Vivaldi's music had been written on edible rice paper. The most (if anything) we would have might be mysterious references to a "Red Priest"