40 yearold computers still in use 93

fOn Sat, 12 Mar 2005 07:22:13 GMT in alt.folklore.computers, ace

Mirroring is not enough. Walnut Creek and SimtelNet used to have mbuttive collections of software for many platforms, but decided at some point to reorganize and just dropped most of the non-Windows stuff. There are still a lot of links out there pointing to no longer existent SimtelNet directories. The GNU software was replicated elsewhere but most of the non-GNU and MS DOS software just ceased to be available on the net. With the advent of the web, Archie and Gopher servers ceased to be maintained, so there was and is now no way to find other pointers or locations where these packages may be available on the net.

I see a parallel here with system drives or root parbreastions. Mirroring ensures that certain common, frequent problems do not affect availability. But if something goes wrong elsewhere in the hardware, there's a serious problem with a kernel or build, someone accidentally or deliberately deletes critical data or programs, you'll just have redundant mirrors of a non-functional system. You still need to keep backup copies of a known good configuration to protect against other accidental happenings or deliberate actions.

So we need some systems out there that are not just automatically maintained mirrors of what another site decides to make available, but are intelligently maintained replicas of what is-was available. What happened with TOPS-10 is likely to happen to any purely mirrored site eventually.

-- Thanks. Take care, Brian Inglis Calgary, Alberta, Canada

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