That ancient computer game?

Yes, indeed. The DOS-based game was developed in 1971 by Don Rawitsch, Bill Heinemann, and Paul Dillenberger. In 1974, the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium produced and released it. In 10 editions or more, it sold over 65 million copies to be the most popular game of its times.

What’s it got to do with the web and its past?

Enter the Internet Archive (IA). This non-profit in San Francisco recently added Oregon Trail to its vast collection of obsolete games, enabling the general public to play the vintage game through a browser. IA is dedicated to preserving the past of the web and every day it adds gigabytes of old material to its archive.

So why should I care?

As we go more and more digital, and the web becomes a part of our existence, our ‘remembrance of things past’ also includes the internet. But not many seem interested in collecting and archiving websites and software. Things evolve so fast in the cyberworld that unless someone takes the pain to preserve the old and the archaic, we lose them forever.

Wasn’t Google doing this?

Not any more, it seems. It has drawn much flak for deviating from its mission statement which it released in 1999, a year after its launch. It said, “Google’s mission is to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

Activists say Google’s mission included preservation of the past for years. To be fair, it made all the right moves at the start. In 2001, it bought the Deja news research archives and relaunched it as Google Groups, where users could track messages from as far back as 1981. In 2004, Google Books famously said it would scan every known book. In 2006 came Google News Archive, featuring news dating back 200 years. But Google’s priorities seem to have changed over time — or so says Web writing platform Medium .

What happened?

Well, observers say Google is not what it used to be. Since 2010, it has changed focus, and the archival projects went into limbo; some of them were abandoned totally. Reports suggest Google Groups is kept only for research purposes and sees hardly any updates. The archives are still online, but users can’t search them by date. In 2011, Google pulled the plug on its News Archives. Google Books, still online, scans much less now. Even the flagship Google Search does not focus on the history of the web now.

Yes, I know. The timeline view in search was removed some years ago…

Exactly. The Timeline View helped users filter search results by date better than at present. To top it all, in November 2014, Google boss Larry Page said the company has “outgrown” its mission statement, and its priorities have shifted. Google now focuses on the future, mostly — social media, robotics and artificial intelligence, self-driving cars and fibre-optics.

Sad, but can Internet Archive match up to what Google envisaged?

In fact, IA started operations in 1996, two years before Google was founded. Its reach goes beyond mere web pages. It collects and offers access to all kinds of music websites, photos, books and games. It also hosts over 6 million copyright-free books, 1.9 million videos, 2.3 million audio recordings, over 10,000 audiobooks and 668,000 news broadcasts with full-text search.

Is IA our only saviour?

The Wayback Machine, also set up in 1996, is another good Samaritan. It indexes more than 435 billion web pages as old as 20 years. This is the largest archive of the web. And there are a few others, but this is only a thin slice of what we have to protect. And that’s why many are appealing to Google to take the past seriously.

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