al@gtx.com (Alan Filipski) (08/03/88)
The notion of "checking the net" brings up a number of interesting questions:
Can all USENET articles that have ever been posted be collected? Has
any site, possibly in the course of its usual backups, saved
essentially all articles over some long time period? Or, does all this
wisdom, wit, blood, sweat, tears and bullshit just evaporate? Who
volunteers to reconstruct the entire USENET corpus and put it on
CD-ROM? Surely this is more important than Stargate or GNU or SDI or
archiving LANDSAT data or geneologies or stockpiling Helium. What will
we tell our grandchildren when they ask us if MES or the line-eater are
just legends or what FUBAR or noalias or "backbone cabal" or RTFM
mean? Which would be more relevant to the needs of the average 20th
century technogeek, "Look it up in the Encyclopaedia Britannica", or
"grep for it in USENET"? Can we deprive armies of future scholars of
publishing "The Annotated USENET: A Cultural Coredump of the Early
Information Age", in 4,312 volumes? Should we tell the FBI that this
is a den of sedition and evil conspiracy so they will get their tapes
rolling, then request copies via the FOI act?
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( Alan Filipski, GTX Corp, 8836 N. 23rd Avenue, Phoenix, Arizona 85021, USA )
( {allegra,decvax,hplabs,amdahl,nsc}!sun!sunburn!gtx!al (602)870-1696 )
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