Then there's delightful efforts like this.

This example gives me faith that the important things will be copied and recopied as necessary, and the ephemeral things that are lost might not be all that lost.

I wonder what will happen to all of the digital-only movies and tv shows being made today. Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, and others are all making stuff that you can't buy on physical media and so if they decide that something shouldn't be available anymore, then it won't be.

Why do you feel digital media can't be preserved?

There are DVD renditions of old media. Cassettes were popular at one time only to be supplanted by newer technologies and it will be the same for current media formats.

To cite an example, I used to listen to cassette music while growing up and was hugely fond of them (Walkman, anybody?) That was then supplanted by digital mp3 players, and now streaming over the internet.

If something is worth preserving, newer technology will make sure it is!

That is just my opinion for you.

There are thousands (at least) of movies that existed on VHS that never made it to DVD, or streaming. They have effectively been lost.

The same is true for audio. Lots of records never made the transition to cassettes. Lots of cassettes never made it to CD. Lots of CD's never made it to digital.

Just this morning I remembered a song I used to like a lot as a teen-ager. I looked for it on Amazon, iTunes, all of the streaming services, and it no longer exists. A general Googling shows there are plenty of re-makes by other artists years later. I managed to find one copy of the vinyl single on fleaBay, so I bought it. But effectively, this song no longer exists for the rest of the world.

These things will happen to digital, too, when we move on to whatever is next.

http://monsterfeet.com/grue/

Eaten By A Grue, the Infocom podcast

A podcast about Infocom games, text adventures, and interactive fiction Hosted by Kevin Savetz and Carrington Vanston.

http://simh.trailing-edge.com/software.html

which had the original vax/vms Dungeon (zork) that I played when young. It actually referenced MEMQ like I remember:

    <DEFINE FEEL-FREE (LOSER)
     <TELL "FEEL FREE, CHOMPER!">
     <MEMQ ......
    The rest is, alas, unintelligible (as were the implementers).

    curl https://eblong.com/infocom/ | grep href | grep -v http | cut -d '"' -f2 | awk '{print "curl -O https://eblong.com/infocom/" $0}' | bash -x

I usually do these sorts of things in a loop, sometimes like:

    <something> | while read f
    do
      sleep 10
      <do-something-with> "$f"
    done

I usually use this:

  <something> | tr '\n' '\000' | xargs -0 -n1 command

Just commenting because this was a bugbear of mine when getting started in bash.