[Info-vax] VMS documentation apparently available at the Wayback Machine

[johnwallace4 at yahoo.co.uk]

On Thursday, 7 May 2015 19:54:03 UTC+1, Paul Anderson  wrote:
> On 2015-05-06 18:33:42 +0000, johnwallace4 at yahoo.co.uk said:
> 
> > On Wednesday, 6 May 2015 19:23:43 UTC+1, Simon Clubley  wrote:
> >> The VMS documentation appears to be available at the WayBack Machine:
> > 
> > Sssshhh. Don't let the lawyers know or it'll vanish like a lot of
> > other stuff has done.
> 
> The VMS documentation was produced by VAX/DEC Document with the 
> "invisible ink" build switch set, so yes, it's at risk of disappearing 
> altogether.
> 
> Paul

With the greatest respect Paul (honest): conspiracy theories
aside, and accepting that I may be having a sense of humoUr
failure, I'm pretty sure some DEC-related stuff *has* already
disappeared from the wayback machine at the request of the
original site owner/copyright holders.

archive.org has a well documented policy and procedure for how
that happens, have a look at
http://archive.org/about/faqs.php
and in particular at the section titled
"Some sites are not available because of robots.txt or other
exclusions"

Sadly I don't have specific examples to hand, but likely it
was Digital Semiconductor or Alpha-chip related stuff (or
some other stuff I used to use for work but no longer had a 
local copy of). Or it could be documentation related to
DEC/CPQ kit I've owned personally. It's been a while though,
so I could be wrong.

Or maybe not. Here's a couple of more obvious examples for
y'all:
http://www.digital.com/
or (to restrict it a little bit)
http://www.digital.com/info.html
For both of which, archive.org simply says:
"Sorry. This URL has been excluded from the Wayback Machine."

You'll find many references to digital.com/info.html by searching
for (e.g.) the URL plus "Steve Lionel". Many other items were
available underneath the top level page (e.g. DTJ), not just
Steve L's stuff. Not there now. No explanation as to why.

This all predates the relatively recent sale of digital.com to a
domain-name trader.

Making stuff vanish from archive.org doesn't make it disappear
altogether, I agree. But it can make life unnecessarily
frustrating.

Now returning to whatever it was we were discussing...