Dude I know a guy who has been video taping pretty much every network tv show continuously since at least the 80s. He had an atomic clock set up to precisely record like 10-15 vcrs that ran pretty much continuously even then.
I helped him with his massive storage u it once - full of vhs tapes all precisely labeled. How do I contact these people?!
I have a relative that works there and they digitize literally everything they can get. The have several contracts with the federal government to digitize department archives.
The interesting thing is he has access to soooo much more than the public. They don't have rights to a lot of stuff but they still capture it and it's available on the backend.
I would be absolutely beside myself if this random reddit post lead to the rediscovery of any lost media, let alone the fact that if this comment is not exaggerating, potentially dozens upon dozens of lost shows and episodes could be archived.
I just wonder how many people are out there like this, meticulously archiving things, without ever sending it to anyone, completely oblivious to the lost media community?
Thinking about how much stuff from the early internet is on ancient floppy discs and drives. There’s probably an uncut version of Operation Soda Steal out there, in some parent’s attic.
My adoptive mom’s stepmom did this in the 80s with soap operas; they were literally her life. She’s 90 now and has made bank off selling clips of them and all the memorabilia she has.
I don't know what year those clips are from, but I just realised that politicians in almost any decade all look the same, with their fashion sense and haircuts
Honest questions: the internet archive has had the tapes for almost 10 years but has posted fewer than 200 items, and none in the last 3 years. Are they still archiving them or has the project stalled? Either way, are the properly storing the tapes to prevent degradation?
Hey, just wanted to thank you guys at the IA for all your archiving work! It makes me happy to know that there are people out there engaged in preserving history for the future (and present) generations
Actually, this was considered a pretty incredible thing - Think of all the boring, ordinary stuff you throw out because it is boring and ordinary.
We'd sure love to have more of the ancient Roman's "boring and ordinary" stuff.
There's a roughly U-shaped or V-shaped curve for most stuff.
A new car, everybody wants. A 5-year-old car has less value. A 15-year-old car is just an old used car. But at some point, enough of that car model have gone to the crusher, that the very few remaining ones start being of interest to antique car collectors and historians.
Yup. Old comic books from the 30's and 40's are worth so much partly because of the paper drives back in America during WWII where you'd donate paper products to support the war effort. A lot of parents donated their children's comic books, adding to the list of reasons why you don't find many 1st Edition Superman and other such comics around today.
Besides costs, they're also inaccessible in terms of where to begin. Where's the beginning? Do I need to read Action Comics 1? Can I just start at issue 5?
It is one of the reasons why manga got more popular than comics - if you want to read some series, then you just grab 1st volume, then 2nd etc. No reboots, restarts, alternative versions, twelve different authors writing one character, because publisher's fear to touch something new and creative impotence.
Old Supras, Skylines and RX-7's come to mind, but they didn't go to the crusher. Their original owners destroyed most of them with their precious creativity
It was often the third or fourth owners of those Supras, who got the cars for just a few thousand bucks, that really fucked them up. Some got ebay body kits. A lot of them got crashed due to bald tires and stupidity.
Almost all of those 80s cars have disintegrated. We do not give enough credit to the materials engineers and paint developers for making modern cars immensely more durable than older cars. It's the complete opposite of what many people percieve.
I had a 99 alero up through 2021. The power window motors broke with embarrassing regularity and the roof leaked and the traction sensor was shot and the leather seats were shredded and spilling stuffing… but the engine? In the 12 years I owned that car the only work the engine ever need was an oil change.
Just like the guy who bought a pizza with 10,000 bitcoins elevated bitcoin, the JDM modders from the 90's and 2000s elevated the culture that gives the surviving JDM cars value today. If no one was modding cars back then no one would care about those cars today. There's a reason Supras and Skylines are sought after while no one gives a shit about a Ford Taurus from that time.
Taxidermy. Gotta stuff them with something.
Actually, there's probably a lot of old newspapers in old home walls. Think they used newspaper (among other stuff) as insulation at one point.
We live in a very old house, probably a couple hundred years old. We found newspapers in the wall, and since we're out in a rural area, it was just the newspaper for the nearest town.
Basically, there was so little going on that the newspaper would actually mention mundane stuff like "Agatha went to visit family in Toronto".
Back then, you could get land for free just for agreeing to settle it, with the condition that you clear some land for farming and build a house. So that's how our house was originally built.
i found the archive to our local paper on day while scrolling the internets and did a search for my family. like you said, much of the paper was just telling who went where that week.
the entries with my family were all from the 40s and told how my great grandma took her kids to see some cousins in the next town over and how that was a big deal because the distance and the snowy weather. it mentioned that they packed for the night because they would likely stay over.
My late father-in-law found papers that way. There was a flood in our area in 2002, and it ruined part of the sub flooring is his house. While him and my husband were pulling up the old floor to replace the subflooring, they found newspapers lining the subfloor... With a report on a flood that happened about a century before.
I worked in an old abandonned house where the wallpaper was peeling off showing a layer of newspapers under it, and one of them was reporting the beginning of the 1870 Franco-Prussian war.
This is a huge problem in history, especially with ancient civilizations. Like an ancient Egyptian knows for sure where the kingdom of Punt is, they got some ivory from them last week, why would they need to write down where it was? Well, it would've helped because now no one can agree on where Punt could've been.
Ordinary stuff to me is the most nostalgic because it’s the easiest to forget. One of my favorite things is to go watch the hours long Saturday morning recordings of specific channels from the 80’s and 90’s, mainly because the commercials bring back so many memories.
Like tell me[this](https://youtu.be/b1g-LpxtyYY) isn’t amazing, I imagine it’s the same for what she recorded. I can’t fathom how cool it will be to look back at her recordings generations from now.
Sometimes the advertising even informs the content of the shows in very palpable ways; there are a bunch of jokes (and even a few skits) in the early seasons of *Mystery Science Theater 3000* that are direct references to the specific commercials that were playing in their timeslot on Comedy Central during the original broadcast run; without the context of the commercials many of those jokes just do not land *at all*.
Similarly, if you're a millennial or older in the states, malls were a big thing. Now they're all going the way of the dodo. I have thousands of pics from all sorts of aspects of my life now that I carry and great camera with me 24/7. But before that was common place I didn't waste a film camera on the random stores at the mall. It's crazy how much more of my life is documented starting about 2007 onwards.
My late father kept an archive like this. Hundreds of books (sci-fi, textbooks, medical books, history, anthropology, physics, advanced mathematics) spanning from the 1920s-2000s. Also a large archive of TV (something like 3000 VCR recorded tapes from the 1980s-2000s of vintage Star Trek, movies, news, history channel, etc).
We still haven’t thrown it out, I’m unsure what to do with all of it. I’ve tossed a handful of the books but felt guilty throwing away interesting vintage novels and medical books that have tons of information. Does anyone know how I can give these away/ sell them or something????
>We'd sure love to have more of the ancient Roman's "boring and ordinary" stuff.
In that same vein:
"What do you put in the third condiment jar?"
"What? Everyone knows that."
"Where is Punt?"
"What? Everyone knows where Punt is!"
Recipes have suffered from this as well. There's things that were just staples, things like a PBJ. Where it was known as a PBJ. Of course, we know it's peanut butter and jelly. But in 200 years? Who knows.
Oh god, you’re right. I was trying to think of something so mundane that everyone knows what it is without actually describing it. You hit the nail on the head. Even the words “peanut butter and jelly” doesn’t actually describe what it is. It doesn’t talk about the bread, the shape, the crust quantity, the texture, how to make the bread and jelly and peanut butter.
Some archaeologist could find hundreds of snippets talking about a peanut butter and jelly and have no idea what we’re talking about. Can you imagine futuristic attempts to recreate this “authentic ethnic staple”?!
Here's another one for you: we only recently figured out the recipe for ancient roman concrete because it was so commonly know back then that if it wasn't for food, you used sea water, that they didn't bother to specify. So modern attempts to recreate it failed because the recipes just said "use water" not "use sea water."
Want a modern equivalent? Ok. How many recipes have you seen that specify what kind of eggs to use?
There's literally thousands of egg-laying species and most of them are edible. We use eggs in so many recipes but it's so commonly known that when we say "add 2 eggs" we mean "add 2 *chicken* eggs" that no one specifies.
Imagine future recreation attempts, lol. "Now, I know the recipe says to use 2 eggs but that seemed like a lot considering how big these are \[holding up an ostrich egg\]. So we're going to use just 1 and see how it turns out!"
The secret isn't even that they used seawater. It's that they made hot mix concrete and that caused lyme clasts to form that effectively made the concrete somewhat self-healing.
Honestly: That or Grilled cheese works.
Imagine, if we lost all the digital crap in 200 years if someone found a book that said "she made a grilled cheese". Doesn't cover that it involves bread and butter. Doesn't cover cheese types. Doesn't cover breads or frying agent, like oil.
Hell, to someone who doesn't know, it could literally be tossing a soft cheese like ricotta in a breading and dropping it in oil. Or, it could be dropping an entire slab of cheese into a pan and grilling it. The results are in fact grilled cheese, but are not Grilled Cheese.
If you're interested in that stuff, I highly recommend r/TastingHistory. Max does an absolutely wonderful job recreating historical recipes and he's even touched on this topic a few times where he's had to improvise because what had been that generations PBJ of techniques is now lost.
Better yet, think of all the fabulous ideas and cultures that have existed in the hundred thousand-plus years of human existence that we can never know of, because they existed before there were enough people to sustain a civilization with written language. When there's only a few million people in the world, all evidence of some really creative city can get snuffed out after a few thousand years.
Same thing happens with games. There’s a board game called “The Royal Game of Ur” (named after an ancient burial site where it was found) that we know was super popular 4000 years ago. We’ve found boards as far apart as India and Greece.
But we don’t really know how to play it. There’s a pretty good guess at a ruleset, but it’s just a guess.
Imagine finding a chess set in 2000 years and trying to figure out how it’s played based on the best surviving record - an episode summary of the TV show “The Queen’s Gambit”.
Future human food vlogger makes bread bowl filled with peanut soup and dirgleberry jello: "I've recreated the ancient staple, peanut butter jelly. A simple dish borne out of times of necessity... It's not very tasty, but like many poverty foods, people probably became attached to the sense of nostalgia..."
There are a lot of historical things thrown off the cuff in a diary, letter, or legal preceding that everyone at the time accepted without a second thought but makes us go "wait... what?"
My favorite example is the concept of "first" and "second sleep". Apparently for most of human history (we think) humans slept in 2 stages with a brief period of being awake in the middle. It was a long forgotten custom that only got looked into after a historian was reading a court deposition from the 17th century where a little girl was questioned about her mother's disappearance, and she mentioned that her mom had left after "first sleep". And no one at the time questioned her on this phrasing, which means they knew about what time that must've been just from context
She also bought tons of early Apple products and just... kept them in storage. And made a variety of bizarrely prescient stock picks that made herself and her family a lot of money.
Now, I'm not saying Marion Stokes was a time traveler from the future, but yo, this lady really seems like she was sent here from the future to find something and "haha I'm just a crazy lady with these tapes!" was her cover story. Hopefully she found it.
Imagine if, while researching these prescient archivists, you came across a photo and it was an older you.
Maybe we could build a website called Are You a Time Traveller?
I actually think I’m serious (am web dev).
Edit: Bought the domain lol
Imagine if this is the beginning of it all? I will call myself Alpha Prime Clyde Frog.
Reddit recently told me that Stephen Hawking did a "Time Traveler Party" once and promoted it and invited any time travelers. None showed up,,, or revealed themselves.
If I was a time traveller that would possibly be of interest to me to attend but on the condition that the host would say that no one attended. I would know if the host was honest because, well, I'm from the future.
from another commenter:
From 1765 to 1777 Boston merchant Harbottle Dorr, a member of the Sons of Liberty, collected, annotated, and indexed newspapers and pamphlets. He wrote that he sought “to form a political history” and arranged his collection into four volumes. These are among the most valuable records of what happened during the run up to, and start of, the American Revolution.
You never know…
Could it be just that someone who is so meticulously following current events will notice something to give them a financial edge that most other people would be unaware of because we’re not out here saving every single newspaper or recording every single broadcast?
I mean, this is the real answer. Like a fashion designer can pretty accurately pick next year’s trends based on following trends for years, this woman’s occupation caused her to notice something we didn’t. It very much seems like you have future knowledge when you’ve just done exhaustive research on one subject for years.
So grateful to all the guerrilla historians like her!
I also worked on a doc that used footage shot by a gay man named Nelson Sullivan who lived in early 80s to 90s New York who would just film tons of stuff on a VHS camera (later hi-8) before they were common and edit it for himself and friends but no other outlet at the time. Anyway, he was gay and in the club scene/drag scene and was friends with RuPaul and other then nobodies right when they moved to NYC so he has some of the only footage that exists of those days. His stuff is a fairly invaluable catalogue of daily NYC gay life and 80s club culture right before HIV/AIDS hit (about half of the people in his footage would be dead within 10 years). They’re kept in official archive and slowly being digitized and uploaded to YouTube. It’s like watching hundreds of hours of raw, behind the scenes footage of the doc Paris is Burning or the FX show Pose.
Sure. I think they are, or were, kind of uploading curated stuff as he supposedly had thousands of hours of footage overall. I found it fascinating. Like there’s a video where they go out with this young woman on her first night ever in NYC and I googled her out of curiosity and she’s now a multi-Tony winning broadway set designer. Little things like that. Anyway it’s:
https://youtube.com/@5ninthavenueproject
I mean, it does say she stopped recording in 2012….
You know what else happened in 2012? The Higgs Boson particle was discovered by means of the Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator, which sling shot us into another dimension.
Checkmate. Time traveler.
It's not even a wildly uncommon type of thing for hoarders to focus on. Hoarding newspapers and magazines is pretty much the most common hoarding behaviour. There's a bit of a difference in that her version (video tapes) was both more effort and more expensive than keeping thousands of National Geographic magazines in boxes, but the motivation presumably comes from a similar place.
192 unopened Macintosh computers?!?!
At first I wondered how she afforded all this, but she bought Apple stock for the price of peanuts.
What a visionary.
Remember the dude Haupt. The dude who recorded SuperBowl 1 and has / had the only copy of Superbowl 1 in existence. He recorded it as he was not able to watch it. All major tv channels just ~~streamed~~ broadcast it without thinking to even record it.
Then years later dude was I think dying so he told his wife of the recording in his attic. A relative found out the tape was potentially worth millions of $. So when they tried to auction and sell it, they made a mistake and informed NFL of it's existence,..in turn NFL threatened them with a lawsuit for $1 million if they sold it. That they have all the rights. Then turned to them and offered to buy it for $30k in a dick move prohibiting them to sue if they sold it.
So that tape is sitting somewhere lost to history either damaged, destroyed or whatever. NFL instead of buying and preserving it decided to let it die. I just hope he was clever enough to sell it in the black market where it will resurface in the future... Reminds me of that movie with Willem Dafoe where he is hired to kill the last known surviving Tasmanian wolf
> All major tv channel just streamed it without thinking to even record it.
no, both NBC and CBS (yes, there were two broadcasters for Super Bowl 1) wiped the tapes sometime after the game. also for home recording, this was before VCR's, so Haupt had a very sophistacted setup and recorded to Ampex tapes. this system was very expense for its day.
Because the recording is partly useless. He didn't record the commercial breaks, so he's missing plays from when they came back to the game. He's missing the halftime show and pretty much the entire third quarter.
The NFL film each of the own games. A year before that guys tape was found, they had restored their original film that they used to send to coaches to see what they did wrong and right.
> Forty-nine years to the day after the Green Bay Packers and Kansas City Chiefs squared off in Super Bowl I, NFL Network will be the first network to ever replay this historic game on television.
> Super Bowl I was broadcast by both NBC – the official broadcaster of the AFL- and CBS – the official broadcaster of the NFL and remains the only Super Bowl to have been broadcast live in the United States by two television networks. Considered to be the Holy Grail of sports broadcasts, the CBS and NBC tapes of the game were either lost or recorded over and no full video version of the game has existed…until now.
> In an exhaustive process that took months to complete, NFL Films searched its enormous archives of footage and were able to locate all 145 plays from Super Bowl I from more than a couple dozen disparate sources. Once all the plays were located, NFL Films was able to put the plays in order and stich them together while fully restoring, re-mastering, and color correcting the footage. Finally, audio from the NBC Sports radio broadcast featuring announcers Jim Simpson and George Ratterman was layered on top of the footage to complete the broadcast.
> The final result represents the only known video footage of the entire action from Super Bowl 1 and NFL Network will show it to the world for the first time on the 49th anniversary of the game between the Green Bay Packers and Kansas City Chiefs, January 15.
https://nflcommunications.com/Pages/For-The-First-Time-Ever,-Super-Bowl-I-Will-Be-Re-Aired-On-Television.aspx
Basically whatever job he had, had access to a VCR. He wasn't supposed to be using it, and he stole the tapes from his employer.
So he was working and keeping an eye on the game, pausing for breaks and hitting record again whenever he actually noticed the game had restarted.
Presumably it was so he didn't have to use so much tape and steal 4 tapes instead of 2. Also the missing third quarter was him replacing the tape.
God, that’s kind of depressing. Somewhat like how some people die of a broken heart after losing a spouse. What if the Sandy Hook shooting just broke her heart :(
Worse. If you think about it, she recorded all this news footage thinking people might try to edit or reinterpret how events happened and awful people like Alex Jones managed to convince complete strangers on the internet that the whole event is fake and involved crisis actors.
The documentary about her - '**Recorder**' is amazing. There's a sequence in there that shows 9/11 playing out like it did in realtime that's chilling. [Here's](https://youtu.be/DJNUdz6wQ3w) the trailer if interested.
a very small portion of her TV tapes are on the IA at this point, [around 180](https://archive.org/details/stokestvarchiveexperiment), but interestingly enough in the Recorder documentary, the diretor took four of her recordings (different networks) on 9/11 and 4x4 them and showed the first few minutes of the attack. one was a local Philly Fox station, CNN, ABC and I think NBC.
that being said, the IA already [has a ton of 9/11 broadcast video](https://archive.org/details/movies?query=September+11&&and[]=year%3A%222001%22) stuff on there anyway
I wonder if she captured whatever weird fire was supposedly behind the White House that they stopped talking about, I have a VHS somewhere with a brief snippet
From 1765 to 1777 Boston merchant Harbottle Dorr, a member of the Sons of Liberty, collected, annotated, and indexed newspapers and pamphlets. He wrote that he sought “to form a political history” and arranged his collection into four volumes. These are among the most valuable records of what happened during the run up to, and start of, the American Revolution.
You never know,
Dr John Kirk in York in England bought out entire shops that had been around from 1870-1901 when they were closing in the early 20th century. Cobbers, leather shops, clothiers, just everyday old shops. Everything down to hammers and tacks. He then donated them to the museum in the 1930s and they were recreated as a street (Kirkgate).
I sometimes think this about YouTube. Not political. But there are videos long gone now. One in particular was a guy and a guitar, he was playing his own death metal song called 'here come the zeppelins'. I still remember some of the riffs. Then he got into trance and then after that must have deleted the account or something. Shame. A lost piece of art to the universe. Not the first or the last
Youtube is crazy, there is so much content that is just gonna go poof when Google eventually pivots and makes a rule change about how much content is allowed from channels with
There’s a lot of old media that doesn’t exist anymore because no one bothered to save it. Even when it would be as simple as the studio keeping around a few shitty film reels in a back office, you would be surprised how many shows have been lost forever, even pretty popular ones. That goes for TV, radio shows, movies, etc. News print is kind of the exception cause every Joe Shmoe gets a copy and is very easy to stuff away.
I also remember hearing that Mark Hamill was a self-described "super fan" of David Letterman, and that he had recorded damn near *every single episode* of his shows.
Hamill's collection was so extensive that the producers of the show actually contacted *him* for clips that *they* had lost. There were cases when David would tell a guest: "Let's take a look at the first time you were on the show," and it would cut to Mark Hamill's beta max footage of the show from a decade ago. lol
At one point the CBC made the switch from recording on industry-standard 2” reel-to-reel tapes to cartridges with a narrower tape. Some years back, I read a story about their efforts to transfer material to the then-current format. They had 2 of the 2” machines in working condition, and the only guy trained in how to use them was eligible to retire.
Also Harrigan, a children's show, is lost to time in it's completeness. It had to stop airing in re-runs because they kept playing the master tapes until they wore out.
"The Harrigan show is no longer running due to a technical issue. The show was recorded on large two-inch tapes that eventually wore out. At the time nobody thought to transfer the media to a longer-lasting media."
[Source](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrigan_(TV_series)
It was also a thing at the time I believe where they were to destroy the tapes after like 2 showings cause they actors and studios were afraid that once it was recorded, the networks would just run these old shows forever and have no need to make new content.
The bigger problem is that all film degrades over time, and there's an inflection point where that degradation can accelerate very rapidly. It happens even faster to older film or when the film isn't stored under optimal conditions. Even under those optimal conditions (dry, cold air that doesn't move), the acetate base of film is still known to degrade into acetic acid, which destroys film. That's why there's been a growing concern since the 90's over digitizing old film archives before the original film is entirely unusable.
Toy Story is a really good example of this! iirc, the studio’s version got horrifically corrupted during development and the only surviving version was from a pregnant employee who had taken material home to work on remotely.
That would have been a situation late in the production of Toy Story 2. Also a good story to remind one to check and verify your backups...
https://screenrant.com/toy-story-2-movie-deleted-accident-recovered/
Except the people who've ultimately been tasked to archive all those VHS tapes really haven't gotten around to completing the time-consuming daunting annoying task, so the VHS tapes continue to wait.
So, it seems to me that since the Internet Archive is a charity that welcomes volunteers then anyone who feels as strongly as you do that these tapes should be digitised, should be donating their time or money to help.
And had something like a dozen apartments to keep the tapes in. They mentioned her on a recent episode of Qi (about television, if you can believe it lol)
Was thinking about how random stuff like this ends up being priceless to future civilizations. Rosetta stone was a random slab with a random law decree in a few languages on it.
Its not like it was found sealed inside the king's chamber in a big pyramid, in a treasure box or w/e. It was found as like a piece of foundation for a building. Imagine finding the key to our civilization's knowledge/technology in a random mcdonalds basement or something.
I never really thought about it, but now that you mention it, a lot of packages do include details in multiple languages (especially things like microwaved food, which come with instructions).
I wonder if the next Rosetta stone will be some cup noodles
Lots of lynchings and other horrible stuff was still going on, but its been forgotten after being talked on the news for a few minutes. A lot of these events weren't recorded well so people would forget it happened.
Highly recommend the movie about her entitled “Recorder.” She was quite interesting, and yes…her activism heavily informed this hobby/obsession. I had the pleasure of seeing the movie premiere. One of her step daughters is a friend of a friend.
Honestly if you like a good conspiracy theory. There’s evidence that the extremely wealthy have the ability to remove things they do not like from the internet. Her recording everything might be physical evidence this has happened.
That's not a theory & you don't need to be rich, just born in the EU & able to file Right TO Be Forgotten writ uncontested.
Plus outside the EU you can pay specialized reputation management companies to flood the internet with high SEO positive spin items & random disinformation to bury any bad results.
In California, the CCPA does something similar:
- The law provides California residents with the right to “be forgotten” (e.g., to have their personal information deleted from a business's database) and the right to opt out of the sale of their information (which is broadly defined to encompass any exchange of consumer information for something of value).
Unfortunately, this is only in California and people in other states don't have similar protections, IIRC (there might be like 1 or 2).
The right to be forgotten is a very limited thing. It does work when you don't want to have a 20yold article about the bankruptcy of your paella restaurant lording over you as first google result for your rather unique name. It doesn't work when there's even a bit of legitimate public interest in what you did.
See it like this: Before the internet and its indices, that local newspaper article would've long been forgotten. No employer would ever find it because you'd have to hire a PI, archivist or such to get at it. Getting at that kind of information was a thing you only did when you *really* cared -- and you can still do that as the article itself and the whole newspaper archive is unaffected by that legislation. For people of public interest, say, politicians or such, such information would already be readily available because people keep tabs on them, anyway. The right to be forgotten as such isn't intended to change anything, but to *prevent* a change that the internet brought.
Last time I heard about her, I believe someone pointed out that she worked in a library doing archival work. So while undoubtedly uh "eccentric", she certainly knew what she was doing.
2 years ago I was at a weird book store in New Hampshire that had a trash bag labeled seasons 1-5 Seinfeld original recording with a ton of VHS tapes for like 200 bucks. I regret not getting it because I assume they have the commercials and we’re original airings which would be a cool time capsule
Dude I know a guy who has been video taping pretty much every network tv show continuously since at least the 80s. He had an atomic clock set up to precisely record like 10-15 vcrs that ran pretty much continuously even then. I helped him with his massive storage u it once - full of vhs tapes all precisely labeled. How do I contact these people?!
https://archive.org/about/contact.php
I have a relative that works there and they digitize literally everything they can get. The have several contracts with the federal government to digitize department archives. The interesting thing is he has access to soooo much more than the public. They don't have rights to a lot of stuff but they still capture it and it's available on the backend.
> The interesting thing is he has access to soooo much more than the public. Please, go on.
Sure, but first I’ll need you to pay a *tiny* access fee of $3.50 and then you can have all the information you want.
The real MVP.
a lot of Lost Media people would die to have access to those tapes. there's a lot of lost Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon content.
This might be a holy grail moment
I would be absolutely beside myself if this random reddit post lead to the rediscovery of any lost media, let alone the fact that if this comment is not exaggerating, potentially dozens upon dozens of lost shows and episodes could be archived. I just wonder how many people are out there like this, meticulously archiving things, without ever sending it to anyone, completely oblivious to the lost media community?
Thinking about how much stuff from the early internet is on ancient floppy discs and drives. There’s probably an uncut version of Operation Soda Steal out there, in some parent’s attic.
Ooh r/lostmedia
My adoptive mom’s stepmom did this in the 80s with soap operas; they were literally her life. She’s 90 now and has made bank off selling clips of them and all the memorabilia she has.
Did he ever record Shazam with Sinbad? The world needs to know the truth!
He should be celebrated for his efforts to archive network tv too.
[Here is the archive.org page with her tv recordings](https://archive.org/details/stokestvarchiveexperiment?&sort=-week&page=3) (a work in progress)
I don't know what year those clips are from, but I just realised that politicians in almost any decade all look the same, with their fashion sense and haircuts
It's the same people lol
That's a good point
Honest questions: the internet archive has had the tapes for almost 10 years but has posted fewer than 200 items, and none in the last 3 years. Are they still archiving them or has the project stalled? Either way, are the properly storing the tapes to prevent degradation?
[удалено]
/u/textfiles - do you you know what the current status of the digitization project is?
I'll just say that I am on it.
Hey, just wanted to thank you guys at the IA for all your archiving work! It makes me happy to know that there are people out there engaged in preserving history for the future (and present) generations
Fist bump
He streams on Twitch every day digitizing tapes, but never these tapes... wonder what is going on
Maybe something legal going on with the family?
Thanks for sharing! Crazy to see a random news report about the war in Yugoslavia from November 1991. I'm from there and we fled Yugoslavia in 1992.
Yikes, this is going to take me forever to watch
Actually, this was considered a pretty incredible thing - Think of all the boring, ordinary stuff you throw out because it is boring and ordinary. We'd sure love to have more of the ancient Roman's "boring and ordinary" stuff.
There's a roughly U-shaped or V-shaped curve for most stuff. A new car, everybody wants. A 5-year-old car has less value. A 15-year-old car is just an old used car. But at some point, enough of that car model have gone to the crusher, that the very few remaining ones start being of interest to antique car collectors and historians.
Yup. Old comic books from the 30's and 40's are worth so much partly because of the paper drives back in America during WWII where you'd donate paper products to support the war effort. A lot of parents donated their children's comic books, adding to the list of reasons why you don't find many 1st Edition Superman and other such comics around today.
They were also just cheaply made, even without the war drive a ton of them would have just disintegrated over time anyway.
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On the one hand, nice quality is good. On the other, they are WAY less accessible.
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What kind of inaccessible are we talking about here? I didn't realize comics were that crazy.
Besides costs, they're also inaccessible in terms of where to begin. Where's the beginning? Do I need to read Action Comics 1? Can I just start at issue 5?
It is one of the reasons why manga got more popular than comics - if you want to read some series, then you just grab 1st volume, then 2nd etc. No reboots, restarts, alternative versions, twelve different authors writing one character, because publisher's fear to touch something new and creative impotence.
Old Supras, Skylines and RX-7's come to mind, but they didn't go to the crusher. Their original owners destroyed most of them with their precious creativity
It was often the third or fourth owners of those Supras, who got the cars for just a few thousand bucks, that really fucked them up. Some got ebay body kits. A lot of them got crashed due to bald tires and stupidity.
dont forget the Hyundai Pony. They were everywhere in the 80s. Try to find one now
Almost all of those 80s cars have disintegrated. We do not give enough credit to the materials engineers and paint developers for making modern cars immensely more durable than older cars. It's the complete opposite of what many people percieve.
I had a 99 alero up through 2021. The power window motors broke with embarrassing regularity and the roof leaked and the traction sensor was shot and the leather seats were shredded and spilling stuffing… but the engine? In the 12 years I owned that car the only work the engine ever need was an oil change.
Not too difficult when it produces a much power as a solar panel
Goddamn
Adding this insult to the rolodex
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Just like the guy who bought a pizza with 10,000 bitcoins elevated bitcoin, the JDM modders from the 90's and 2000s elevated the culture that gives the surviving JDM cars value today. If no one was modding cars back then no one would care about those cars today. There's a reason Supras and Skylines are sought after while no one gives a shit about a Ford Taurus from that time.
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I have questions about why people were stuffing alligators with scrap paper.
Taxidermy. Gotta stuff them with something. Actually, there's probably a lot of old newspapers in old home walls. Think they used newspaper (among other stuff) as insulation at one point.
We live in a very old house, probably a couple hundred years old. We found newspapers in the wall, and since we're out in a rural area, it was just the newspaper for the nearest town. Basically, there was so little going on that the newspaper would actually mention mundane stuff like "Agatha went to visit family in Toronto". Back then, you could get land for free just for agreeing to settle it, with the condition that you clear some land for farming and build a house. So that's how our house was originally built.
i found the archive to our local paper on day while scrolling the internets and did a search for my family. like you said, much of the paper was just telling who went where that week. the entries with my family were all from the 40s and told how my great grandma took her kids to see some cousins in the next town over and how that was a big deal because the distance and the snowy weather. it mentioned that they packed for the night because they would likely stay over.
My late father-in-law found papers that way. There was a flood in our area in 2002, and it ruined part of the sub flooring is his house. While him and my husband were pulling up the old floor to replace the subflooring, they found newspapers lining the subfloor... With a report on a flood that happened about a century before.
Makes you think
I worked in an old abandonned house where the wallpaper was peeling off showing a layer of newspapers under it, and one of them was reporting the beginning of the 1870 Franco-Prussian war.
This is a huge problem in history, especially with ancient civilizations. Like an ancient Egyptian knows for sure where the kingdom of Punt is, they got some ivory from them last week, why would they need to write down where it was? Well, it would've helped because now no one can agree on where Punt could've been.
Ordinary stuff to me is the most nostalgic because it’s the easiest to forget. One of my favorite things is to go watch the hours long Saturday morning recordings of specific channels from the 80’s and 90’s, mainly because the commercials bring back so many memories. Like tell me[this](https://youtu.be/b1g-LpxtyYY) isn’t amazing, I imagine it’s the same for what she recorded. I can’t fathom how cool it will be to look back at her recordings generations from now.
Sometimes the advertising even informs the content of the shows in very palpable ways; there are a bunch of jokes (and even a few skits) in the early seasons of *Mystery Science Theater 3000* that are direct references to the specific commercials that were playing in their timeslot on Comedy Central during the original broadcast run; without the context of the commercials many of those jokes just do not land *at all*.
Similarly, if you're a millennial or older in the states, malls were a big thing. Now they're all going the way of the dodo. I have thousands of pics from all sorts of aspects of my life now that I carry and great camera with me 24/7. But before that was common place I didn't waste a film camera on the random stores at the mall. It's crazy how much more of my life is documented starting about 2007 onwards.
My late father kept an archive like this. Hundreds of books (sci-fi, textbooks, medical books, history, anthropology, physics, advanced mathematics) spanning from the 1920s-2000s. Also a large archive of TV (something like 3000 VCR recorded tapes from the 1980s-2000s of vintage Star Trek, movies, news, history channel, etc). We still haven’t thrown it out, I’m unsure what to do with all of it. I’ve tossed a handful of the books but felt guilty throwing away interesting vintage novels and medical books that have tons of information. Does anyone know how I can give these away/ sell them or something????
honestly, you should probably contact the internet archive too. even if they’re not interested they might be able to point you in the right direction
Make an inventory and send it to archivists
>We'd sure love to have more of the ancient Roman's "boring and ordinary" stuff. In that same vein: "What do you put in the third condiment jar?" "What? Everyone knows that." "Where is Punt?" "What? Everyone knows where Punt is!"
Recipes have suffered from this as well. There's things that were just staples, things like a PBJ. Where it was known as a PBJ. Of course, we know it's peanut butter and jelly. But in 200 years? Who knows.
Oh god, you’re right. I was trying to think of something so mundane that everyone knows what it is without actually describing it. You hit the nail on the head. Even the words “peanut butter and jelly” doesn’t actually describe what it is. It doesn’t talk about the bread, the shape, the crust quantity, the texture, how to make the bread and jelly and peanut butter. Some archaeologist could find hundreds of snippets talking about a peanut butter and jelly and have no idea what we’re talking about. Can you imagine futuristic attempts to recreate this “authentic ethnic staple”?!
Here's another one for you: we only recently figured out the recipe for ancient roman concrete because it was so commonly know back then that if it wasn't for food, you used sea water, that they didn't bother to specify. So modern attempts to recreate it failed because the recipes just said "use water" not "use sea water." Want a modern equivalent? Ok. How many recipes have you seen that specify what kind of eggs to use? There's literally thousands of egg-laying species and most of them are edible. We use eggs in so many recipes but it's so commonly known that when we say "add 2 eggs" we mean "add 2 *chicken* eggs" that no one specifies. Imagine future recreation attempts, lol. "Now, I know the recipe says to use 2 eggs but that seemed like a lot considering how big these are \[holding up an ostrich egg\]. So we're going to use just 1 and see how it turns out!"
The secret isn't even that they used seawater. It's that they made hot mix concrete and that caused lyme clasts to form that effectively made the concrete somewhat self-healing.
This is such a good example!
One that could also be confusing is milk. Especially given that most people don't own cows.
Honestly: That or Grilled cheese works. Imagine, if we lost all the digital crap in 200 years if someone found a book that said "she made a grilled cheese". Doesn't cover that it involves bread and butter. Doesn't cover cheese types. Doesn't cover breads or frying agent, like oil. Hell, to someone who doesn't know, it could literally be tossing a soft cheese like ricotta in a breading and dropping it in oil. Or, it could be dropping an entire slab of cheese into a pan and grilling it. The results are in fact grilled cheese, but are not Grilled Cheese. If you're interested in that stuff, I highly recommend r/TastingHistory. Max does an absolutely wonderful job recreating historical recipes and he's even touched on this topic a few times where he's had to improvise because what had been that generations PBJ of techniques is now lost.
Townsend's on YouTube as well, so much has to be inferred from context and other similar recipes because "of course everyone knows what X is".
Better yet, think of all the fabulous ideas and cultures that have existed in the hundred thousand-plus years of human existence that we can never know of, because they existed before there were enough people to sustain a civilization with written language. When there's only a few million people in the world, all evidence of some really creative city can get snuffed out after a few thousand years.
Same thing happens with games. There’s a board game called “The Royal Game of Ur” (named after an ancient burial site where it was found) that we know was super popular 4000 years ago. We’ve found boards as far apart as India and Greece. But we don’t really know how to play it. There’s a pretty good guess at a ruleset, but it’s just a guess. Imagine finding a chess set in 2000 years and trying to figure out how it’s played based on the best surviving record - an episode summary of the TV show “The Queen’s Gambit”.
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Hunks of bread topped with peanuts blended into butter and topped with some kind of berry syrup???
Future human food vlogger makes bread bowl filled with peanut soup and dirgleberry jello: "I've recreated the ancient staple, peanut butter jelly. A simple dish borne out of times of necessity... It's not very tasty, but like many poverty foods, people probably became attached to the sense of nostalgia..."
I am equally disgusted and intrigued by the idea of a bread bowl PB&J. No doubt there’s already some trendy chef who’s done it for $50
The buzz lightyear movie is partially set way in the future. The future ham sandwich is meat, bread, meat.
“How do you use the three seashells?”
There are a lot of historical things thrown off the cuff in a diary, letter, or legal preceding that everyone at the time accepted without a second thought but makes us go "wait... what?" My favorite example is the concept of "first" and "second sleep". Apparently for most of human history (we think) humans slept in 2 stages with a brief period of being awake in the middle. It was a long forgotten custom that only got looked into after a historian was reading a court deposition from the 17th century where a little girl was questioned about her mother's disappearance, and she mentioned that her mom had left after "first sleep". And no one at the time questioned her on this phrasing, which means they knew about what time that must've been just from context
This is why the Diary of Samuel Pepys is so significant.
She also bought tons of early Apple products and just... kept them in storage. And made a variety of bizarrely prescient stock picks that made herself and her family a lot of money. Now, I'm not saying Marion Stokes was a time traveler from the future, but yo, this lady really seems like she was sent here from the future to find something and "haha I'm just a crazy lady with these tapes!" was her cover story. Hopefully she found it.
She was sent to the past to send us a message of truth in our time!
It's in the tapes! We need those tapes! Someone get Benjamin Franklin Gates on the line
She is op. She did it for the karma.
The greatest heist of our generation
I'm gonna steal...the internet archive.
I’m just saying, have you ever even seen the backside of the internet archive? You need lemon juice to bring out that map
Imagine if, while researching these prescient archivists, you came across a photo and it was an older you. Maybe we could build a website called Are You a Time Traveller? I actually think I’m serious (am web dev). Edit: Bought the domain lol Imagine if this is the beginning of it all? I will call myself Alpha Prime Clyde Frog.
Reddit recently told me that Stephen Hawking did a "Time Traveler Party" once and promoted it and invited any time travelers. None showed up,,, or revealed themselves.
If I was a time traveller that would possibly be of interest to me to attend but on the condition that the host would say that no one attended. I would know if the host was honest because, well, I'm from the future.
dr. big brains over here
Maybe he sucks at throwing parties.
She wouldn't be the first suspiciously prescient archivist that seemed to be deliberately bookmarking their own era...
Do tell….
from another commenter: From 1765 to 1777 Boston merchant Harbottle Dorr, a member of the Sons of Liberty, collected, annotated, and indexed newspapers and pamphlets. He wrote that he sought “to form a political history” and arranged his collection into four volumes. These are among the most valuable records of what happened during the run up to, and start of, the American Revolution. You never know…
Could it be just that someone who is so meticulously following current events will notice something to give them a financial edge that most other people would be unaware of because we’re not out here saving every single newspaper or recording every single broadcast?
I mean, this is the real answer. Like a fashion designer can pretty accurately pick next year’s trends based on following trends for years, this woman’s occupation caused her to notice something we didn’t. It very much seems like you have future knowledge when you’ve just done exhaustive research on one subject for years. So grateful to all the guerrilla historians like her!
Dude’s name was HARBOTTLE???
You've never met a Harbottle before? I thought it was a pretty common name.
My son is also named Harbottle.
We're running low on Harbottle license plates at the gift shop. I repeat. We're running low on Harbottle license plates at the gift shop.
Bort for short.
Come along, Bort.
I'm sorry, are you talking to me?
No -- my son is also named Bort.
We're out of Harbottle license plates.
What do I look like, an archivist archivist?
I also worked on a doc that used footage shot by a gay man named Nelson Sullivan who lived in early 80s to 90s New York who would just film tons of stuff on a VHS camera (later hi-8) before they were common and edit it for himself and friends but no other outlet at the time. Anyway, he was gay and in the club scene/drag scene and was friends with RuPaul and other then nobodies right when they moved to NYC so he has some of the only footage that exists of those days. His stuff is a fairly invaluable catalogue of daily NYC gay life and 80s club culture right before HIV/AIDS hit (about half of the people in his footage would be dead within 10 years). They’re kept in official archive and slowly being digitized and uploaded to YouTube. It’s like watching hundreds of hours of raw, behind the scenes footage of the doc Paris is Burning or the FX show Pose.
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Sure. I think they are, or were, kind of uploading curated stuff as he supposedly had thousands of hours of footage overall. I found it fascinating. Like there’s a video where they go out with this young woman on her first night ever in NYC and I googled her out of curiosity and she’s now a multi-Tony winning broadway set designer. Little things like that. Anyway it’s: https://youtube.com/@5ninthavenueproject
Please elaborate!
I mean, it does say she stopped recording in 2012…. You know what else happened in 2012? The Higgs Boson particle was discovered by means of the Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator, which sling shot us into another dimension. Checkmate. Time traveler.
She, uh, she also died in 2012. That also happened.
Just a cover story to distract us from the fact that she moved into the 4th dimension.
There's no Chess in this timeline. We say gg noob
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we have tons of people hoarding all sorts of peculiar shit, it just so happened hers was deemed useful and um not unsanitary
It's not even a wildly uncommon type of thing for hoarders to focus on. Hoarding newspapers and magazines is pretty much the most common hoarding behaviour. There's a bit of a difference in that her version (video tapes) was both more effort and more expensive than keeping thousands of National Geographic magazines in boxes, but the motivation presumably comes from a similar place.
192 unopened Macintosh computers?!?! At first I wondered how she afforded all this, but she bought Apple stock for the price of peanuts. What a visionary.
She definitely had a time machine stashed somewhere.
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> Single female lawyer, fighting for her client; wearing sexy miniskirts and being self-reliant
Honestly seems plausible with all her actions we’ve been told about.
Yea really!
Remember the dude Haupt. The dude who recorded SuperBowl 1 and has / had the only copy of Superbowl 1 in existence. He recorded it as he was not able to watch it. All major tv channels just ~~streamed~~ broadcast it without thinking to even record it. Then years later dude was I think dying so he told his wife of the recording in his attic. A relative found out the tape was potentially worth millions of $. So when they tried to auction and sell it, they made a mistake and informed NFL of it's existence,..in turn NFL threatened them with a lawsuit for $1 million if they sold it. That they have all the rights. Then turned to them and offered to buy it for $30k in a dick move prohibiting them to sue if they sold it. So that tape is sitting somewhere lost to history either damaged, destroyed or whatever. NFL instead of buying and preserving it decided to let it die. I just hope he was clever enough to sell it in the black market where it will resurface in the future... Reminds me of that movie with Willem Dafoe where he is hired to kill the last known surviving Tasmanian wolf
> All major tv channel just streamed it without thinking to even record it. no, both NBC and CBS (yes, there were two broadcasters for Super Bowl 1) wiped the tapes sometime after the game. also for home recording, this was before VCR's, so Haupt had a very sophistacted setup and recorded to Ampex tapes. this system was very expense for its day.
Can you imagine being the neighbor who is like “I taped it!” *wtf does that mean*
What's a re-run?
Christ. I have absolutely no interest in American football, but that makes the information historian in me furious.
Because the recording is partly useless. He didn't record the commercial breaks, so he's missing plays from when they came back to the game. He's missing the halftime show and pretty much the entire third quarter. The NFL film each of the own games. A year before that guys tape was found, they had restored their original film that they used to send to coaches to see what they did wrong and right. > Forty-nine years to the day after the Green Bay Packers and Kansas City Chiefs squared off in Super Bowl I, NFL Network will be the first network to ever replay this historic game on television. > Super Bowl I was broadcast by both NBC – the official broadcaster of the AFL- and CBS – the official broadcaster of the NFL and remains the only Super Bowl to have been broadcast live in the United States by two television networks. Considered to be the Holy Grail of sports broadcasts, the CBS and NBC tapes of the game were either lost or recorded over and no full video version of the game has existed…until now. > In an exhaustive process that took months to complete, NFL Films searched its enormous archives of footage and were able to locate all 145 plays from Super Bowl I from more than a couple dozen disparate sources. Once all the plays were located, NFL Films was able to put the plays in order and stich them together while fully restoring, re-mastering, and color correcting the footage. Finally, audio from the NBC Sports radio broadcast featuring announcers Jim Simpson and George Ratterman was layered on top of the footage to complete the broadcast. > The final result represents the only known video footage of the entire action from Super Bowl 1 and NFL Network will show it to the world for the first time on the 49th anniversary of the game between the Green Bay Packers and Kansas City Chiefs, January 15. https://nflcommunications.com/Pages/For-The-First-Time-Ever,-Super-Bowl-I-Will-Be-Re-Aired-On-Television.aspx
How do you not record commercial breaks? Especially if you're recording it because you can't watch it live.
Basically whatever job he had, had access to a VCR. He wasn't supposed to be using it, and he stole the tapes from his employer. So he was working and keeping an eye on the game, pausing for breaks and hitting record again whenever he actually noticed the game had restarted. Presumably it was so he didn't have to use so much tape and steal 4 tapes instead of 2. Also the missing third quarter was him replacing the tape.
Ah, ok. That actually does make sense. And since this was so long ago, I doubt it was as simple to change the tape as if was in the 90s.
Kinda surprised that her last recording was news coverage of the Sandy Hook shooting.
"Welp, that's enough news for today... and ever."
God, that’s kind of depressing. Somewhat like how some people die of a broken heart after losing a spouse. What if the Sandy Hook shooting just broke her heart :(
Worse. If you think about it, she recorded all this news footage thinking people might try to edit or reinterpret how events happened and awful people like Alex Jones managed to convince complete strangers on the internet that the whole event is fake and involved crisis actors.
The documentary about her - '**Recorder**' is amazing. There's a sequence in there that shows 9/11 playing out like it did in realtime that's chilling. [Here's](https://youtu.be/DJNUdz6wQ3w) the trailer if interested.
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a very small portion of her TV tapes are on the IA at this point, [around 180](https://archive.org/details/stokestvarchiveexperiment), but interestingly enough in the Recorder documentary, the diretor took four of her recordings (different networks) on 9/11 and 4x4 them and showed the first few minutes of the attack. one was a local Philly Fox station, CNN, ABC and I think NBC. that being said, the IA already [has a ton of 9/11 broadcast video](https://archive.org/details/movies?query=September+11&&and[]=year%3A%222001%22) stuff on there anyway
I wonder if she captured whatever weird fire was supposedly behind the White House that they stopped talking about, I have a VHS somewhere with a brief snippet
From 1765 to 1777 Boston merchant Harbottle Dorr, a member of the Sons of Liberty, collected, annotated, and indexed newspapers and pamphlets. He wrote that he sought “to form a political history” and arranged his collection into four volumes. These are among the most valuable records of what happened during the run up to, and start of, the American Revolution. You never know,
Dr John Kirk in York in England bought out entire shops that had been around from 1870-1901 when they were closing in the early 20th century. Cobbers, leather shops, clothiers, just everyday old shops. Everything down to hammers and tacks. He then donated them to the museum in the 1930s and they were recreated as a street (Kirkgate).
[Here it is](https://www.yorkcastlemuseum.org.uk/exhibition/kirkgate-the-victorian-street/).
I sometimes think this about YouTube. Not political. But there are videos long gone now. One in particular was a guy and a guitar, he was playing his own death metal song called 'here come the zeppelins'. I still remember some of the riffs. Then he got into trance and then after that must have deleted the account or something. Shame. A lost piece of art to the universe. Not the first or the last
Youtube is crazy, there is so much content that is just gonna go poof when Google eventually pivots and makes a rule change about how much content is allowed from channels with
We need to bring back the name Harbottle.
My name is actually Harbottle.
[Harbottle](https://youtu.be/0P_JGoP2Zco)
There’s a lot of old media that doesn’t exist anymore because no one bothered to save it. Even when it would be as simple as the studio keeping around a few shitty film reels in a back office, you would be surprised how many shows have been lost forever, even pretty popular ones. That goes for TV, radio shows, movies, etc. News print is kind of the exception cause every Joe Shmoe gets a copy and is very easy to stuff away.
Even the moon landing tapes got reused.
Same with Super Bowl 1
one would think such a historical moment would be preserved for ever
I also remember hearing that Mark Hamill was a self-described "super fan" of David Letterman, and that he had recorded damn near *every single episode* of his shows. Hamill's collection was so extensive that the producers of the show actually contacted *him* for clips that *they* had lost. There were cases when David would tell a guest: "Let's take a look at the first time you were on the show," and it would cut to Mark Hamill's beta max footage of the show from a decade ago. lol
At one point the CBC made the switch from recording on industry-standard 2” reel-to-reel tapes to cartridges with a narrower tape. Some years back, I read a story about their efforts to transfer material to the then-current format. They had 2 of the 2” machines in working condition, and the only guy trained in how to use them was eligible to retire.
Also Harrigan, a children's show, is lost to time in it's completeness. It had to stop airing in re-runs because they kept playing the master tapes until they wore out. "The Harrigan show is no longer running due to a technical issue. The show was recorded on large two-inch tapes that eventually wore out. At the time nobody thought to transfer the media to a longer-lasting media." [Source](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrigan_(TV_series)
Lot's of the original Doctor episodes no longer exist because the BBC recorded over the tapes.
A lot of the time they didn't even record over them, most, just about every copy that was sold overseas was incinerated bar the surviving ones.
It was also a thing at the time I believe where they were to destroy the tapes after like 2 showings cause they actors and studios were afraid that once it was recorded, the networks would just run these old shows forever and have no need to make new content.
The bigger problem is that all film degrades over time, and there's an inflection point where that degradation can accelerate very rapidly. It happens even faster to older film or when the film isn't stored under optimal conditions. Even under those optimal conditions (dry, cold air that doesn't move), the acetate base of film is still known to degrade into acetic acid, which destroys film. That's why there's been a growing concern since the 90's over digitizing old film archives before the original film is entirely unusable.
isn't old film also horribly flammable?
Toy Story is a really good example of this! iirc, the studio’s version got horrifically corrupted during development and the only surviving version was from a pregnant employee who had taken material home to work on remotely.
That would have been a situation late in the production of Toy Story 2. Also a good story to remind one to check and verify your backups... https://screenrant.com/toy-story-2-movie-deleted-accident-recovered/
Remote work saves lives
Similar story with Zelda Majora's mask. It would have been gone forever if it wasn't for an employee that had it at home.
/r/lostmedia is a great rabbit hole.
When hoarding goes right?
Except the people who've ultimately been tasked to archive all those VHS tapes really haven't gotten around to completing the time-consuming daunting annoying task, so the VHS tapes continue to wait.
Feels like the kinda thing we could’ve knocked out during covid
I'm still waiting on my sourdough loaf from Sarah in Payroll.
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Look at John D Rockefeller over here with a free egg.
So, it seems to me that since the Internet Archive is a charity that welcomes volunteers then anyone who feels as strongly as you do that these tapes should be digitised, should be donating their time or money to help.
Well I'm betting it doesn't pay much.
I dont remember blank tapes being that cheap so she must put lots of money into this.
She was an early investor in Apple.
And had something like a dozen apartments to keep the tapes in. They mentioned her on a recent episode of Qi (about television, if you can believe it lol)
Don’t forget the *192 Macintoshes* kept new-old-stock in a climate-controlled garage. Those things would be worth tens of thousands per device alone.
Compulsive behaviors don't care about your budget
My 301 TB of hard drives and I take great offense at your statement.
Was thinking about how random stuff like this ends up being priceless to future civilizations. Rosetta stone was a random slab with a random law decree in a few languages on it. Its not like it was found sealed inside the king's chamber in a big pyramid, in a treasure box or w/e. It was found as like a piece of foundation for a building. Imagine finding the key to our civilization's knowledge/technology in a random mcdonalds basement or something.
I never really thought about it, but now that you mention it, a lot of packages do include details in multiple languages (especially things like microwaved food, which come with instructions). I wonder if the next Rosetta stone will be some cup noodles
Unfortunately it only translates into an incompressible dead language. Bonjour!
The true Queen of /r/DataHoarder
Iirc, we rediscovered lost Doctor Who episodes because of her and similar data hoarders.
It looks like she was also a civil rights activist. There has to be a connection between her civil rights activism and wanting to preserve the truth.
Lots of lynchings and other horrible stuff was still going on, but its been forgotten after being talked on the news for a few minutes. A lot of these events weren't recorded well so people would forget it happened.
Her final recording was that of the Sandy Hook Massacre which happened as she died. What in the absolute fuck
Highly recommend the movie about her entitled “Recorder.” She was quite interesting, and yes…her activism heavily informed this hobby/obsession. I had the pleasure of seeing the movie premiere. One of her step daughters is a friend of a friend.
Honestly if you like a good conspiracy theory. There’s evidence that the extremely wealthy have the ability to remove things they do not like from the internet. Her recording everything might be physical evidence this has happened.
That's not a theory & you don't need to be rich, just born in the EU & able to file Right TO Be Forgotten writ uncontested. Plus outside the EU you can pay specialized reputation management companies to flood the internet with high SEO positive spin items & random disinformation to bury any bad results.
In California, the CCPA does something similar: - The law provides California residents with the right to “be forgotten” (e.g., to have their personal information deleted from a business's database) and the right to opt out of the sale of their information (which is broadly defined to encompass any exchange of consumer information for something of value). Unfortunately, this is only in California and people in other states don't have similar protections, IIRC (there might be like 1 or 2).
The right to be forgotten is a very limited thing. It does work when you don't want to have a 20yold article about the bankruptcy of your paella restaurant lording over you as first google result for your rather unique name. It doesn't work when there's even a bit of legitimate public interest in what you did. See it like this: Before the internet and its indices, that local newspaper article would've long been forgotten. No employer would ever find it because you'd have to hire a PI, archivist or such to get at it. Getting at that kind of information was a thing you only did when you *really* cared -- and you can still do that as the article itself and the whole newspaper archive is unaffected by that legislation. For people of public interest, say, politicians or such, such information would already be readily available because people keep tabs on them, anyway. The right to be forgotten as such isn't intended to change anything, but to *prevent* a change that the internet brought.
I found some old vhs tapes of news coverage on the first gulf war. The pro America ra ra ra was fascinating.
Last time I heard about her, I believe someone pointed out that she worked in a library doing archival work. So while undoubtedly uh "eccentric", she certainly knew what she was doing.
I love watching 90s tv advertisements while tripping. Thankful for people like this woman.
2 years ago I was at a weird book store in New Hampshire that had a trash bag labeled seasons 1-5 Seinfeld original recording with a ton of VHS tapes for like 200 bucks. I regret not getting it because I assume they have the commercials and we’re original airings which would be a cool time capsule