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> Are all the message boards and forums where this type of material was likely posted really defunct or unusable now?

The original source of this material (and the other articles) was John Carmack's .plan file. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finger_protocol

The .plan file is by its nature ephemeral, as the user can change it whenever. But the content was archived.

The GitHub is just the latest mirror.

> Will the next historian have to unearth it from github just to copy it to the next platform?

Maybe!

Hey, repo owner here.

That does seem to be the case here. I had re-hosted these .plan files from a website – which has removed them – that had re-hosted them from Shacknews – which had also removed them.

GitHub seemed like a quirk-and-dirty way to re-host these while giving others an easy way of duplicating the original files so they’re less likely to be lost in the ether.

Why not? While this is a bit of an exception, given the prominence of the author, most internet content is always at risk of being wiped away from the record. Let a thousand mirrors bloom.