Re: Lost knowledge

[nathan@visi.com (Nathan Mates)]

In article <3301152f.97336426@netnews.worldnet.att.net>,
Bruce Maples <themaples@worldnet.att.net> wrote:
>With so much Apple II info in people's heads and in various little
>text files and UseNet messages here and there, what are we going to do
>when it and/or they are gone?  I mean, Nathan's FAQ is wonderful
>(truly!), but it can't hold _everything_.

   Correction: it doesn't hold everything _yet_.  :)

   That's one of the reasons why I took up the job of maintaining it--
I feel fairly confident in saying that I know a lot about Apple IIs.
Rather than retyping something out of my memory each time some
semi-FAQ is asked, I'm also lazy enough to want to be able to say
"read the FAQ section X.Y" and be mostly over with it. That way, the
easy questions are taken care of right off the bat, and we can flush
out the even more technical questions.

   Because the FAQ is an 'official' FAQ (registered with the
news.answers team 'based' out of rtfm.mit.edu), it is archived on many
web and FTP sites around the world. Also, since my Apple II web pages
are well-organized and all linked together, they're somewhere in the
caches of web search engines like www.altavista.digital.com and others.
Joe Kohn also has an authorized disk full of stuff off my web pages.
In short, there are enough backups of whatever I publish online that
recreating it would probably not be a problem.

   Usenet is also archived on www.dejanews.com, so everyone's posts
for the past few years (unless specified otherwise) are available for
perusal. At one point, wuarchive.wustl.edu may have been archiving all
posts as well, not to mention any private collections out there.

   In short, for anything that's published, there are enough backups
extant that if the original *and* the backups are all unaccessible
permanently, there'll be worse problems than helping newbies with
Apple IIs.

>I have thought about starting to grab this stuff and shove it into a
>Notes database, but haven't yet.

   If you're going to do something for archiving, three words: *Lowest
Common Denominator*. Text/html files (and if you've looked at my
handcoded html, it's highly unobtrusive, unleke the highly annoying
bloat and dreck most computer-generated HTML files) are readable by
anyone and everyone, even 15 years from now. I can't say anything near
the same for the longevity of any commericial app and its proprietary
datafiles.

   Lost knowledge is always going to be a problem; I don't think there
are many who know all the entry points, tricks, and bugs of DOS 3.2.1
off the top of their head still. [And those of you who do, this is not
a challenge to demonstrate that you do unless you want :] However,
there are books and magazines covering that. Those owning them and
have a clue where to look can find such info with a bit of work. So,
scout out comp.sys.apple2.marketplace and build your libraries :)

   And yes, I do plan to keep increasing the size of my A2 FAQ archive.

Nathan Mates
--
<*> Nathan Mates http://www.visi.com/~nathan/      <*>
# What are the facts? Again and again and again-- what are the _facts_?
# Shun wishful thinking, avoid opinion, care not what the neighbors
# think-- what are the facts, and to how many decimal places?  -R.A. Heinlein