[ExI] Tsiolkovsky

[spike]

>... On Behalf Of Eugen Leitl

>...I've spent a few minutes digging, but it would be hard to trace, given it's way pre-web. You have to drill down into academic papers using the full quote...
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We are in the process of becoming ever more comfortable with the notion of lumping everything pre-web as prehistory.  We could even imagine college majors in that, somewhere in the history department.  

A few years ago at the office, we were retiring file cabinets.  I had two cram-full filing cabinets scanned, but never used any of the scanned materials because I had no way to index any of it.  What we need is some way to read through all that material, some of which was hand-written, and create searchable files.  If all those scientific papers written before about mid 90s are not somehow ASCII archived, they are gone forever.  Everything anyone did before about mid 1990s will sink into irrelevance, waiting for some later person to rediscover it all.  Some of it, such as the space stuff, can never be reproduced, for we have not the launch capability now that we had then, nor the motive to recreate it.

spike