I vividly remember following directions and downloading files to play a game someone else uploaded for QBasic. The first page of code were nothing but comments, so I naively assumed that computers could just "understand" prose and display it on screen.
The message boards were extremely helpful (where Red Baron was released!), and even had gurus who wrapped their names with tildes to distinguish themselves.
~Eric~
The OA was aged 11 to 18 while using Prodigy. Recent work on memory tends to suggest that particular age range, perhaps up to early 20s, leaves very strong memories - many things are new &c. So this aspect of OAs life has a lot of importance to the OA.
In the area I live in, we have, in the last 30 years or so, demolished huge factories and whole vertically integrated industries have vanished or moved south to lower wage countries. Foundaries, lock factories, tool making, car making. Those factories were the site of communities - you spend half your waking lives at work - but they were demolished as quick as anything. Some history survives but not the detail/experience.
If anything, digital communities are easier to preserve in the sense that the whole corpus can be captured. Please note I said easier, not easy!
Bingo.
If the business is sold as a potential "going concern" the new owner will have your information.
If not a "going concern" businesses the assets are still flogged off, if only to try get some money back for any creditors it may have had, and any data they have is potentially an asset. Often they will be bought quite cheaply.
Of course someone working for the company as it dies might less officially take the information.
And if an online service is abandoned as-is and stays online for a while unattended, the lack of maintenance may mean it is vulnerable to security flaws it doesn't receive patches for at which point any information stored there is available to any black-hat who cares to look.
https://www.google.com/search?q=stage.dat+inurl%3Atextfiles....
> This same STAGE.DAT got Prodigy in trouble in the early 1990s when users discovered that it could contain fragments of data culled from their PCs. As it turns out, Prodigy's client was filling in "empty" portions of STAGE.DAT with random snippets of system memory. Users were convinced Prodigy was spying on them, uploading this data to its servers (it wasn't); Prodigy denied this and released a tool for the paranoid to zero out their STAGE.DAT files.
Maybe you could say the same about Google or Lycos?
If nobody wants you, there's always cybersquatters.
It had no where to go but away. That data was never on the Internet; it existed in a proprietary format on a proprietary network, far out of reach from the technological layman. It was then shuffled around, forgotten, and perhaps overwritten by a series of indifferent corporate overlords.
