“It is past time to ensure that Palestinians have access to the resources and opportunities needed to participate fully in the global scientific community, and we all have a role to play in advancing this change. This means ensuring that those working among us know that we value their lives and their communities, and it means that they have safe places to learn and work.”
- she/her
- plasmon.neocities.org/
physics undergrad (among other, evil things)
I've hollered about software preservation as a "thing we need to make anything work at all". Even at the Old Job in the 90s we were already dealing with tons of that shit. I ended up at one point rewriting some DOS control software for an outdoor LED display in Perl for a client because the original software was on a failed hard drive (in a failed 286, in 1999) and was just, not available anywhere.
i've seen people pass up or throw away stuff like System Restore CDs for ancient laptops, because they're "useless" or not as interesting to them as some lost media computer game or whatever, and I have to just metaphorically slap them across their faces. You cannot know everybody's use case. Someone, somewhere, has that exact model of laptop, that they're relying on for something just so damn specific for some critical or at least semi-important task. And wouldn't it be awfully nice if they had the peace of mind that, if it ever all went to shit, they could use the correct restore CD to get the thing back in working order, instead of having to deep-dive through ancient forum posts and FTP servers that might or might not still be running, deciphering the 8-character file names of a hundred some WinZip Self Extractors in hopes that maybe one will be the one that enables the PCMCIA slots in their bizarre, manufacturer-customized version of Windows NT 3.51.
This isn't even me exaggerating. In 2015, one of Paris's busiest airports had to shut down temporarily because their air traffic control computers, some of which were still running Windows 3.1, had failed. In a lot of cases, systems like this are so important that the time cannot be spared to take them offline even to upgrade them to newer hardware or software. And if it fails? To say nothing of whether anybody even knows how to fix it, even a skilled maintenance engineer would have trouble repairing a computer without the correct software. And the clock would very much be ticking, if it was not already.
Read about the Yesterweb meltdown and I feel like the big takeaway is that a webring of peoples' gardening sites and pages about NES emulation on Neocities may not be incredibly fertile ground to start a revolutionary mass line organization
Yeah idk what the hell the webring leaders were thinking when they made that site. I have no real connection to the "community" on neocities—I use it to host my blog, and nothing else—but I remember hearing about the yesterweb meltdown.
The funny part is that the people running it had really thought they were onto something—rather than, oh I don't know, give up their dreams of starting The Revolution™ on neocities, they just shut down the whole ring and wrote a big-ass screed. (Did they expect a protracted people's war on ISPs or something?)