Quote:
Originally Posted by Mark
Geeks get crazy and design an internet that is not relient on isp's and corprate money - it must be possible to do this.
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A couple of thoughts to this end.
First:
T'was a time, not too long ago that the Internet was the exclusive domain of A) the military/Feddle Gummint, and B) The cogniscenti of the universities who took their dollar. It's just since the mid-90's that the great unwashed (me n'thee) had access. But....
Information such as you see here was available almost universally. The media was called BBS, or Bulletin Board Systems. These were generally slower (read L O T S !! ) as they were modem to modem connections. No Google existed so knowledge of their existence was largely word of mouth, etc. Most were run by just plain folk who did it on their own, with maybe only 1 to 5 connections allowed at a time.
I still have copies of some Lear, MJ-12 docs, and even transcripts of Lazar interviews which I first encountered on just such systems.
Secondly;
If you have any inkling/curiosity/desire/notion to build your own electronic archive, as I have done, then I suggest you invest in, and investigate what is possible on a machine using Windows 2000 Pro, or Xp Pro (Yes, this is also built into any Linux installation. I'll stick with what most people know).
Both Win2K Pro, and Xp Pro, and for that matter ALL server versions of Windows have on the original CD, tho in most cases is not installed, something called
IIS. This stands for
Internet Information Server. In short, a web server.
With it you can take and archive nearly anything you find on the web. I began doing this almost 13 years ago myself. In the process I have learned to keep most of my own documents and such in HTML form, as a habit. I also wrote a browsing/search system for all this (happens to be one of my specialties, I guess) but not it's necessary for the purpose.
My original intent was to leave for my children/grandchildren a body of knowledge which I felt was both important, informative and educational. I began with Classical literature, important "sacred" and political documents, and the like. This archive has now grown to (if you include both machines I use for this purpose) some
48,000 docs, roughly 4 Gigabytes of info. I have additionally burned off copies at various times to CD's which are now stored at my kid's and two friend's houses.
When/if the "internet" is shut off, if electricity still exists, this whole archive is still available to them, and could also be made available using the old B.B.System as well. Saved on CD, it could also live again, whenever electricity returns. :^)
My classical literature collection, for instance now stands at roughly 1,200 volumes. If you are curious as to what I mean, I keep a "revolving" subset (usually around 300 volumes) on my website and the start point for this monster is here:
http://fredsitelive.com/books/index.php
A couple of things I did along the way, since database programming for the web is one of my things, is take a few things and develop search pages for their contents. Examples:
- A "Wild card" searchable Webster's Unabridged Dictionary. The idea is you type what you know, and put an * where you don't, and let fly. For instance entering abduc* will return the definitions for: Abduce, Abduced, Abducing, Abduct, Abducted, Abducting, Abduction, and Abductor.
- Two excellent bible dictionaries, out of copyright are Vine's and Easton's Bible Dictionaries. I have assembled both into a similar search here.
- An odd one, perhaps, but useful. If you know the latitude and longitude of two zip codes, you can calculate the distance between the two. Yes, I happen to have both a 42,000 entry Database of such data, and a page which will calculate the answer here. This is "as the crow flies" distance, and is from center of one zipcode, to center of the other. Example: The distance from Riverside, Ca. 92509 to Boulder, Co. 80501 is 803 miles, 1,292 Km. And yes, for those who've seen the latest Bourne movie, the zip code 41571 really is for Varney, Ky. ;^)
Anyway... food for thought, and please feel free to browse the links. My site is completely non-commercial. I don't make a dime from all this. Nor do I record your comings and goings in any way. As I said above, it began as a "pay it forward" project for my kids, and such, and it's presence on the Internet is more of the same. Enjoy !!
Fred.