How Old VHS Tapes Helped Save Early Web Design
Conventional wisdom has it that anything published online can never be truly erased. People petition governments for the “right to be forgotten”—to have personal information and images permanently removed from the Internet. But look for a screenshot or image from a page of the very early web, and you’ll find it almost impossible to locate. Prominent technologist Andy Baio, who runs the site Waxy.org, where he promotes tech ephemera and news, has discovered an unlikely portal to an era that has all but disappeared from today’s Internet, and quite nearly from the human record: VHS tapes. With these tapes, now viewable on YouTube, comes a critical look into a period that set the stage for the massive design and technological changes society has undergone over the past 20 years.
Abstraction, both literal and metaphorical, is another reason why projects like Baio’s are so important. “Without cultural artifacts, civilization has no memory and no mechanism to learn from its successes and failures,” the Internet Archive writes on its website. As computers become faster, more advanced, and easier to use, their history retreats at a frightening speed. We have to make an active attempt to save what documentation of this pivotal time in history we have. Otherwise it could be drowned by the tides of progress for good.