• Can anyone spare half a petabyte of data storage?

    From Spalls Hurgenson@[email protected] to comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action on Sun Mar 1 19:21:19 2026
    From Newsgroup: comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action


    Why do I only hear about these things after their gone? Well, nearly
    gone; the administrators of Myrient --a self-described 'video game
    archive'-- is reporting* that due to increased costs, they'll no
    longer be able to maintain their 390TB archive of games 'n' stuff, and
    will be shutting down by end of March. They point their fingers at
    AI-bros for snarfing up all the RAM and hard-disks necessary to keep
    the servers running, but I wouldn't be surprised if there are legal complications as well. I'm not really sure what that archive includes,
    but at 390TB I doubt all of it is on the up-n-up.

    And, myself, I'm not really interested in having untold gigabytes of
    pirated material... but still, resources like Myrient are sometimes
    the only archive for lost games and losing it means losing part of our
    history. Sure, I have no desire to download and play, say the
    Scandanavian release of "Beetle Bug 2" for PC (to pick a game at
    random from that archive)... but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be
    preserved.

    Alas, I've only about 10% of the necessary disk-space (and nowhere
    near enough bandwidth to fill it, even if I were willing to risk the
    legal consequences. But I'll mourn its passing regardless.





    * their report is reported here https://www.tomshardware.com/video-games/390tb-video-game-archive-being-taken-offline-due-to-skyrocketing-ram-ssd-and-hard-drive-prices-ai-driven-supply-squeeze-results-in-closure-of-one-of-the-largest-online-video-game-archives

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