We need to preserve the web’s vanishing history

In a couple of years, the personal computer will turn 50. The Kenbak-1, designed in 1971, was ahead of its time. Only 40 units were made before its manufacturer folded in 1973. The few that still exist can fetch tens of thousands of dollars at auction. Collectors of vintage electronics have created a thriving industry of technonostalgia, from the early Apple computers to the 1980s and 1990s video-game consoles reissued lately by Nintendo, Sony and Sega as “classic” or “mini” editions. Yet far fewer people collect the software and digital services that brought those devices to life.

The world wide web’s 30th anniversary this year brought an outpouring of admiration for the work of Tim Berners-Lee and other http pioneers. But many of their earliest websites have already been lost to history, their servers disconnected before their contents could be archived.

That was before Rob Ford became a website collector, albeit rather by accident. As a web designer himself, he went from winning awards for his own sites to giving them out to others. The Favourite Website Awards started in 2000, and, for the next decade, Ford would spotlight a new website every day on thefwa.com.

“I pretty much spent my entire thirties in my parents’ bedroom updating every day — no days off sick, no holidays,” he says.

The payoff was a unique archive of noteworthy websites that eventually formed the basis for a new book, Web Design: The Evolution of the Digital World 1990-Today, published this month by Taschen. The tome is part nostalgia trip, part reference work. It covers technical changes such as the rise of Flash animation, which brought motion to a

previously static medium and unleashed wild experimentation. There are also novelties such as the first website to invite users to upload their faces (to promote the 2005 movie Wedding Crashers).

They may seem trivial, but capturing these advances in interaction design will be of lasting value to both historians and future generations of developers. While there are museums in Silicon Valley and beyond dedicated to computers and video games, there is no such establishment dedicated to preserving the web. “It needs to exist and it doesn’t,” Ford says.

The closest thing is the Internet Archive, which has now collected more than 330billion web pages. The San Francisco-based nonprofit began in an old church in 1996 and now costs about $18m (R266m) a year to expand and maintain. But while it is a fantastic repository, the archive lacks the signposting and context of a well-curated museum.

Hundreds of millions of tweets, Facebook posts and Instagram images are lobbed on to the web each day, while whole tracts of the internet can disappear with little or no notice. In just the past few months, Google+ has closed down, MySpace somehow “lost” 12 years’ worth of uploads and the longestrunning webcam — FogCam in San

Francisco — narrowly avoided shutdown.

Of course, most people do not want a group of geeks in a former San Francisco church to archive their Snapchats and WhatsApps, however well-meaning or charitable the endeavour. I do not wish to quibble with those arguing for tighter online privacy rules or data-minimisation policies at companies such as Google and Facebook.

But for the sake of posterity, it is time that digital ephemera is valued as highly as the vintage gadgets that used to run it. — © The Financial Times

Whole tracts of the internet can disappear with little or no notice