[rescue] FTP site for archive of _all_ old platforms on it's way

[Magnus]

John Floren wrote:
> I think you guys may be overestimating the number of people who would
> be seeding all these files. 
It doesn't take many.  Every individual seeder helps to defray the
bandwidth hit to the original seeder.  Having a number of simultaneous
leeches even helps, as the leeches leech off of each other at the same
time that they are leeching off of the seeds.

When a dataset is first announced, it's likely to have a bunch of
leeches at once.  They will all help shoulder the load.  When interest
trails off and only one or two at a time come, the hit to a seeder with
no peers is going to be on-par with the hit an ftp server would take.

> How many people do you think are out there
> who really want a copy of <little-known PDP-11 OS> in the first place,
> let alone are willing to torrent it and then leave the torrent running
> for an indefinite length of time?
>   
Try grabbing the torrent for one of the oddball architecture betas of
CentOS Linux sometime, that hasn't been touched in like a year or two
and has been abandoned by the maintainers, and see how many seeds jump
on.  You will be surprised (I sure was).

> FTP, at least, I can see that the file is there and available, and my
> access to it isn't controlled by the number of other people who have
> downloaded it.
As long as the original party continues to have an interest in hosting
the data, he can continue to seed it.  Your access is unhindered.  If
he's lost interest in hosting it, the ftp site would be just as likely
to go away.