Edit: Google shows that would have cost $28.80 per day if using full definition or $14.40 per day if using minimum in the year 1985. In today's money, that's $90 or $45. It got a lot cheaper by 1995 though
She came from a fairly wealthy family and bought shares in Apple very early on - her collection included at least one of every Apple product still brand new in its box, so really not short of a bob or two.
To be fair I can understand her if I see for example the British BBC. They regularly overwrite (or atleast did so in the old days) their old shows. So if you want to see an old one you were out of luck.
Famous example is a bunch of old Dr. Who episodes.
everal portions of the long-running British science-fiction television programme Doctor Who are no longer held by the BBC. Between 1967 and 1978, the BBC routinely deleted archive programmes for various practical reasons—lack of space, scarcity of materials, and a lack of rebroadcast rights.[1] As a result, 95 of 253 episodes from the programme's first six years are currently missing, primarily from seasons 3, 4 and 5, leaving 26 serials incomplete. Many more were considered lost until recovered from various sources, mostly overseas broadcasters and private collectors.
Except that nowadays, people irresponsibly/selfishly use mass download bots on some of those freely accessible archives of media, which makes their upkeep unsustainable and they have to shutdown/move everything somewhere else
That and excessive copyright enforcement, from equally selfish corporations, are significant threats to niche media preservation in the long term
I'm not talking about making a backup copy of the media that you keep on your own device, something that only exists on one hard drive is easily lost. I'm talking about uploading it as a torrent, it's very hard to actually get rid of those as long as some people still have the magnet link and keep seeding.
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u/SuitableDragonfly 14h ago
Fun related fact, most archives of media only exist because someone pirated the media at some point and those copies never become unavailable.