“This is really going to impact institutions that we take for granted,” Internet Archive director of archiving and data services Jefferson Bailey told the Standard, “like our museums, our historical societies, our public libraries, our academic libraries — just a lot of people that keep information free and accessible and online.”
Yes, the trouble with archiving is knowing what will be important in the future, rather than just popular now. We saved a lot of games from the 80’s through 2000’s through piracy, because they were popular to pass around, but we lost a most of the early web because no one thought it would disappear until the internet archive came along.
Not just games. Full operating systems from the 60s and 70s are being kept alive by hobbyists. Unfortunately there is no law or rule about proprietary/company specific software. In 50 years (or less) historians will know more about how the Romans did banking than how it was done in the early days of computing.
Piracy is the reason why video games survived what I call ‘the early creation purge’. Basically if you look at the 20th century and see various media that was created, most of the early stuff is gone. Like in the silent film era, 90% of all the films made (if we are using Hollywood movies as a metric) are lost, and probably also the film of other countries, too. Even 75% of all early sound film is lost, and for TV, the earliest broadcasts were never recorded, and many from the 1940s to 60s were also never recorded and are lost forever.
Video games? They’re the sole exception. Thanks to piracy and emulation, we can play computer and arcade and console games from the 1970s without issue. This has never happened before, and we have emulation devs and software pirates to thank. Ironically the overwhelming majority of abandonware video games online were not the originals… they were copies of copies that someone not only pirated back in the day, but also cracked. As a 90s kid, I smile whenever I see the RawCopy screen when I load up an old MS-DOS game.
Archive.org is doing God’s work for a lot of stuff.
It’s a crying shame what happened to early Doctor Who episodes, to be honest.