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I have a few friends who have died and still have blogsites and videos online. Now g00gle have announced that all accounts that are inactive for 2 years will be terminated. Nobody knows the passwords for most of these sites so eventually they will disappear forever.
I predicted this would have to happen because the dominant video hosting site would eventually use more electricity than a lot of countries. Electricity that is mostly paid for with advertising revenue.
This makes the internet a resource for those living today but unaware of how problems were solved in the past.
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The only thing truly free is the air you breath.
Get a 'free' blog / email / image hosting site and it then depends on the provider, since you are not paying, they can impose any condition they like.
I am amazed that G**gle still host free email. I use it (and back up anything I consider important). I wonder what the reaction would be if they started asking for payment or 'for free' decided to insert advertisements between every line of text.
For videos, there is a tremendous volume posted
As of June 2022, more than 500 hours of video were uploaded to YouTube every minute
Not surprising they want to delete anything that does not generate advertising income.
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I did use punch cards (as a student). Also used tape and ZIP disks.
I did a presentation on IT jobs to 13-14yo students in a high school north-west of Paris. They never noticed that they were surrounded by data centers. The area was an industrial area in the 60s, and many plants have been reconverted to data centers. Even in my somewhat affluent northwestern suburb, there are two football fields worth of data centers not so far away (you hear the fans whizz during hot nights).
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My first contact with computers involved punched paper tape - one roll of it for the program and another for the source data. I think that was in the late 60's.
Then in the 80's I got a Commodore Plus4 to play with. A luxury machine! It had two extra address lines, so it could do bank switching between four 64K blocks.
I did all sort of daft things with it. A machine code program so that I could do screen dumps to a 7 pin dot matrix printer. A spell check program to use with the word processor, but I had to build up the dictionary which, with data compression, could hold about 10,000 words in RAM.
And the piece de resistance, I wrote a compiler for the Commodore Basic. I have no idea now how I did it!
Computers were much simpler then.
