EEGADS, Bob, how do you FIND all these old posts!!!!
Well, fine lady, I can answer that!
In the early years of FR, especially following our assuring the impeachment of Slick Willy Clinton, the MSM and the DS realized that they did not hold a monopoly on public information and thus public opinion. They decided to attack FR and limit its effectiveness through access - access to web publishing MSM news stories.
Of course FR did more than just access MSM media information, FR exposed their underhanded tactics. They could not limit access but they could limit the amount of access. I remember pointing out to JimRob the 'Fair Usage' doctrine of being able to republish excerpts from copyright material as long as such usage was limited; that limitation has never been strictly defined to the best of my knowledge. Much of that was fought out in legal battles; bless JimRob for his courage and persistence.
All that being said, it was obvious that the scope of FR influence on public policy and public view of policy was under threat. I encouraged Jim to build a data base of all of FR's web postings in order to preserve our historical impact at the dawn of the digital age and burn it on a hard drive, a CD or whatever and smuggle it to someone trustworthy in Fiji or the Cayman Islands. The historical impact on the Clinton impeachment and the incident of pulling an obscure easily forgotten event such as Alec Baldwin's scandalous outrage on late night TV and bringing it to broad public exposure are good examples.
JimRob never responded to my urging one way or another. Of course, it was none of my business. So I decided to do my part to preserve FR's inaugural years. By 2001 I had assembled approximately 60,000 files - not all FR naturally but other major historical events and sometimes how FR handled them.
As fate would have it, I lost the data on a hard drive plus a backup CD somehow got corrupted. I was able to recover about 50% of all that, give or take.
Now I backup my hard drive archives on SD cards, thumb drives, the bottom of my feet, wherever. 😉 I also periodically make digital copies of those copies and distribute them to FReepers who will receive them. For example, ransomnote has one of those backups; she may not know that those same historical files that I just posted are available to her also, nor does it matter. I only ask that the recipients hold their copies for posterity.
I could supply you a copy if you want. Right now they probably comprise many more than 60,000 files: html, *.rtf + *.txt files, graphics, *.pdf's - old Word Perfect files since converted to *.rtf files.
Many govt docs, especially of the past few years (DoJ, fed court, Congressional hearings, etc.) pdf's -- on and on... at least 15 gigabytes of data.
Whew! 😅