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Comment by jimmyswimmy | Hacker News Reader

There used to be bookstores and magazine shops. I don't quite mean to say these no longer exist outside of airport waiting areas but they were ubiquitous. Libraries were a source of knowledge rather than a place to get free wifi. Wikipedia's predecessor came as a shelf of books.

This sounds snarky but I don't mean it as such. It's what was available and how much knowledge was passed around. It wasn't hard to learn about even esoteric things if you had a good library. It was hard to find more than one such book though, so there wasn't as much opportunity for expansion of knowledge by comparing approaches.

I like the internet age better though it has become more challenging to separate fact and fiction. The library didn't have too many fake science books.

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> The library didn't have too many fake science books.

As a kid, I found the UFO section of the library and read all kinds of interesting and almost certainly not true things. It was conveniently next to the programming books ..

Pre-internet people subscribed to specialized periodicals. Home Power and Mother Earth News were two. Both were filled with case studies and DIY projects and the back pages had "send $5 for plans to build your own low-head hydro." I'm sure there were more publications (Stewart Brand's publications come to mind, Whole Earth Catalog and CoEvolution Quarterly for two.) The archives of Home Power (1987 - 2018) are here: https://www.homepower.com/

Popular Mechanics and other "Popular xxx" magazines are also examples. If you were lucky your local library subscribed so you could read them there (hopefully people hadn't stolen the issues or ripped pages out.)

Ay one level, obtaining knowledge was different. You went to libraries--assuming you had access to a good university or city one--and good bookstores, which were also somewhat limited outside of major cities. You called people or wrote them letters. Etc.

It was however also just harder and more limited. I definitely had projects in school that required looking through the library stacks and probably ended up with more "winging it" and depending on one or two old sources than would be the case today.

Or if you couldn't find it in a library, you could call a librarian: company, city, university, or otherwise.

I enjoyed the film Desk Set. Katherine Hepburn is one of those librarians, working at a pseudo-NBC company in the 50s. (As a special bonus, it features early movie mainframe hijinks.)

https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/desk_set

A little on a tangent, but I've been thinking that it might be valuable to keep this offline knowledge infra around for backup, afaik properly stored book has lifespan that is still an order of magnitute longer than any digital storage.

It's a complicated question.

On the one hand, barring natural disaster/fire/water leaks/etc., your library book will last a good long time--at least until the library gets rid of it because they need the space and no one's checked it out recently. On the other hand, even with inter-library loan, it's not super-accessible especially if it's in, say, a private university library. And if something does happen to it, it's gone.

On the other hand, a single digital copy won't last as long. But subject to a lot of factors and caveats, copies of that digital artifact can last indefinitely.

Yes, trade-offs all the way down :) Physical damage of the nature you described affects many forms of digital storage too, though I doubt vermins will find them very palatable. And there could be many copies of a book, to your second point. There is also the question of the specialized equipment needed to read the digital media. As I said, trade offs. I try to maintain a personal book library just because I was an avid reader growing up, in the pre-internet days, and I don't want to see the future generations go pure digital, but maybe it is inevitable.

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