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I find this aspect of the Internet really interesting.
It feels like we've grown up with the idea that everything online is forever.
hugo7-
I quite often buy second hand books thinking that their information will never make it onto the internet and be lost forever.
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we've grown up with the idea that everything online is forever.
"once it's on the net, it's there forever" doesn't mean it will always be available at the original address, it means that even if you burn down the original address the resources can pop up again somewhere else because so many people will have local caches of them.
Websites often outlive their creators because storage is cheap and zombie sites usually have little traffic, so it costs more for the host to remove them than to leave them.
Dibble
gbj_tester
I'd also add that things which existed in the 90s might be gone now - my brother created a pretty comprehensive catalogue of major event (Grand Tours and Classics) results up to 1998 when the internet was all fields and maintained and updated it for about five years, but doing it just for fun stopped being fun when various things got in the way, such as changes in technology, the need to earn a living, and the number of asterisks required once the doping stopped being funny and started actually affecting the results. The resource is now gone as far as the public is concerned, and there's no prospect of its coming back because the effort of recoding far exceeds the reward.