Thinking about the gaming magazines I used to read as a kid in the '90s. Some of them have found their way online thanks to preservationist efforts, but most are seemingly gone forever. (I’m talking about the particular magazine I read as a kid, many others have complete or near-complete collections available online in the form of scanned hardcopies.)
Do the publishing houses keep a digital copy of every magazine they release? If so, why don’t they release them? They could probably charge a fee to download them, like other digital magazines do, but of course it’d be great if they just shared them for free for historical purposes on the Internet Archive or something.
It would be an insanely short-sighted practice to not keep masters of these publications forever, no? 🤔 The raw files probably take up a few CDs’ worth of space for the entire run of the magazine. Big assumptions on my part, I have no clue how any of it is done!
So:
- Do they retain the files forever?
- If so, why might they not be shared 20 or 30 years later?
Cheers!
Further, a lot of that old media tied up in proprietary formats that simply don’t exist anymore.
Fuck, half the equipment I used in local television news broadcasting 20 years ago is all up in smoke. Media from that time is on tapes that probably don’t have easily findable tape decks to play them.
I would suspect its similar happens in print media.
In fact, I know it happens in print media because Adobe PageMaker was big for a long time. I used it to build and format my high schools newspaper when I was in my senior year. I was the layout editor because I was the only one who knew how to halfway use it.
Adobe InDesign was the successor to PageMaker and… for a while… you could convert PageMaker documents to InDesign documents, but they dropped that support years ago.
So you want an old Adobe PageMaker file from the 90’s to recreate lost information from then?
Well you better figure out how to pirate both an old copy of Windows and the final version of Adobe PageMaker just to be able to fucking run it in a virtual machine or something. Adobe is fucking ruthless when it comes to copy protection.
End result: Why would a business hold on to documents it functionally cannot use because the proprietary program or hardware used to “read” it no longer functionally exists? They simply won’t the cost of keep useless documents around is too high.
Don’t you threaten me with a good time! Finding a Windows copy is the easy part, even if it’s debatable how safe the copy is. Pagemaker sounds like the hard part.