Paper, web-page, rock

We are madly digitizing all the published materials we can get our hands on, but ex PC Week editor, and web-based software developer, Geoff Ebbs has an insight into the ephemeral nature of our digital obsession.

Recently on?my radio-show Fashion by Dad, I have been reading from Alec Kruger’s book Alone on the soaks, talking about what it was like to be a stockman in the 1930s as as an 11 year old boy leading all the way up to walking off the job on Wave Hill Farm. That was a strike by First Nation Stockman that changed the nature of agriculture in Australia, which you can read about?here?and listen to?here.

Now it’s time for an interesting little side story about the “making of”?Alone on the soaks. You can also listen to this story on the?Fashion by Dad audio channel.

The book was written with Alec by friend of mine, Gerard Waterford. Gerard came to Sydney to do some research because he had heard that one of the stockmen riding with Alec had kept a diary that he wanted to find for his research. Apparently the stockman donated his possessions when he died to the Mitchell Library at the Sydney Uni.

My blazer of glory

Now, in the week that Gerard and his Good Wife Jo came to stay with me and my Good Wife Bec in Newtown in inner city of Sydney, I was given the marvelous opportunity to donate a website that I built in 1995 to the National Library of Australia (NLA). The NLA was making an exhibition of the early days of the web, I’d written a book called the?Australian Internet Book, which had all 65 websites that were in up and running in Australia in February 95 when the first edition came out, six months before Microsoft released Windows 95, which was their first nod to the Internet.

The National Library of Australia archived some of my work from the mid-nineties

So all the 65 websites were in our directory and we built a really, really early web publishing database. So early that some of our clients objected to having long gobbledy-gook in the URLs. They were literally the first database driven websites most Australians had seen. This is before Google, before Amazon, before Microsoft got into the web. Our database was a publishing system to record web pages and it provided the examples of those early websites that were illustrated in the Australian Internet Book.

The Australian Internet Book listed all 66 websites that had been created in Australia

One of the most remarkable things looking back at it is that there were no images. Images weren’t a feature of the web in early part of 1995 (Mozilla 0.9) and … anyway, I thought, “well, this is my place in history. I’m going to be recognized forever as an Internet pioneer.”

“The National Library of Australia will mount an exhibition with my early database publishing system and I will be recorded as one of the first people in the world to do that.”

I spent the better part of a week trying to recreate a four year old website and it was almost impossible. I had engineers from Microsoft in Seattle on the phone and on the Internet. I had a company in Singapore looking at a disk from the computer that I backed up in 1995 using software that was no longer available. We retrieved the backups but could still not rebuild the database or the webpages because I had to rebuild a Windows NT Server and even then we had to try and recreate the software environment to read those files.

In the end, I couldn’t do it.

I could have done it if I had endless amounts of money and or endless amounts of time, but I couldn’t do it and survive. At the same time I had young 3 month old twins, so I was somewhat distracted.

The bedroll in the special collection

In the meantime, while I was going through this brush with fame, this attempt at glory, a?Blazer of Glory, Gerard was hanging out at the Mitchell Library, looking for the diary of Alec Kruger’s mate.

Now listeners to the radio show have just heard from Alec describing what it was like to be an 11 year old boy. He spent three months alone in the desert trying to keep water up to a bunch of cows and then, later, on ripped himself from eyebrow to ear hole on a branch and almost died, it took him three weeks to wake up, so you know he was living under pretty rough circumstances.

Watering the cattle at Love’s Creek: The chapter divider from?Alone on the soaks

One of the people who was with him on that adventurous and dangerous life used to keep a diary at night using a stubby old pencil and had donated the diary to the Mitchell Library, so Gerard, wandered in one morning and said he was researching for a book on the life of Alec Krueger and had heard that there was this diary that’s been donated.

They looked it up in the catalog said, “Oh yes, Sir. That’s part of the special collection. We’ll need a special librarian to go down to you with to the special collection and take out that special piece. It’s never actually been accessed since it was donated.”

So he came home, had lunch, had a chat, I told him about my adventures with the National Library and the Singapore Data Recovery Company, and how many thousands of dollars I was spending trying to earn my Blazer of Glory.

He went back to the Mitchell Library was taken downstairs by one of the special collection librarians.

In the basement there was a cyclone wire gate, or door, the sort of door that rolls back. So they rolled back the gate, the sliding door … rumble, rumble, the cyclone wire gate rumbles open and there, in the special collection, is a swag, a canvas bedroll.

So they unrolled the bedroll, and there, in the middle of the bed roll, there’s a pile of papers and, Gerard said, the smell of a campfire. As they unrolled the swag out came a pile of burned leaves. There were bits of dry grass and a couple of pencils, a pile of paper, written in different inks and pencils over the years. The only copy of those papers in the whole world, and there it was, in the swag.

He used those as part of his research for Alone on the soaks written by Alec Kruger with the help of Gerard Waterford.

My awakening

So, one guy on horseback living a life so rough that none of us alive today can actually imagine it, keeps a record of his day’s activity each night. We can read about it, fifty five years later in?Alone on the soaks, and it just makes our hair stand on end to actually imagine what it was like.

Here’s me, with the help of Microsoft in Seattle and a Singapore Data Recovery Agency recommended by Microsoft as better than any data recovery agency in Australia at the time, and these best minds in the world could not recover a set of information that I’d put together four years earlier.

At that moment I had one of those realizations, one of those road to Damascus moments, and that is that I realized that my engagement in technology - exciting, new and liberating as it was - was actually ephemeral.

Man oh man, that’s confronting.

The power of the book. The power of paper. A self archiving information storage technique, that does not need a power supply. Something you guarantee that future generations will be able to read. Paper, web-page, rock.

I now dedicate a big chunk of my life to collecting books and sharing the contents with my listerners on?Fashion by Dad. Together, we will keep some knowledge outside the singularity. Echoes of Farenheit 451. Watch it and weep. But that’s a story for another day.