90% of ALL movies made before 1929 are now lost forever... The history has vanished.
Theda Bara made more than 40 films between 1914 and 1926, but most were lost in the 1937 Fox vault fire. After her marriage to Charles Brabin in 1921, she made two more feature films and then retired from acting in 1926, having never appeared in a sound film.
only four of her forty films have survived to this day.
I am not entirely convinced that this destruction and loss of history is entirely accidental. Also, it highlights how narrow and prejudiced our impression of history really is, because of the lack of good documentation.
I worked on the PLATO computer system from 1977 - 1984. This was the first multi-user interactive computer system with a graphic interface.It was developed before the mouse was invented. We were convinced that we were programming for the future and that our creations would last forever in the heart of the machine. And then in 1989 funding stopped, the project was ended, the "plug was pulled" and the PLATO system shut down. 15 years of work disappeared overnight.
90% of what you see on the internet today will vanish without a trace and nobody will even know it was ever there.
copyright (c) 2019
William Schaeffer
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