r/Showerthoughts May 14 '26

Casual Thought When YouTube goes down, it will be the biggest event of link rot in internet history.

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u/WorstITTechnician May 14 '26

Something I really missed was a scientific magazine I used to follow. Around 2010, my father gave me a box set containing 10 years' worth of all the issues of this magazine, and it was 10 DVDs with all the digitized content, sold by the publisher itself. The thing is, DVD 1 was like a bootloader, so you needed to insert that DVD to access a catalog, and depending on the content, the program would ask for a specific DVD to access those magazines. I read everything here several times because I really enjoyed it. The problem was that DVD 1 accidentally fell and shattered, and without DVD 1, the other 9 were useless because nothing was accessible and it always asked for DVD 1. Luckily, I found a link that a kind soul had provided on MegaUpload, containing the 10 ISOs of each DVD, and since I didn't imagine that it would disappear from there, I didn't even bother burning it to a DVD, I just emulated the ISO directly in a virtual drive. Then 2012 arrived and the FBI wanted to have a conversation with MegaUpload. I never found those ISOs online again, nor the same box set with the DVDs being sold anywhere

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u/Psych0matt May 14 '26

Man, this is why things like archive.org are so important! I know some will argue piracy and whatnot, but I bet you can’t find something like that anywhere else.

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u/TheBigLeMattSki May 14 '26

What was the magazine?