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... and in 2019 the "digital.com" domain is apparently hosted by a site that can't handle the traffic of this article. SPECIAL BONUS: Their current robots.txt appears to be blocking the old Digital.com pages from the WayBack machine. Argh.


They do at least acknowledge the history of the name, though you'll do some scrolling to see it: https://digital.com/about/

That said, being a nerd of a certain age range, I saw "digital.com" and I got very excited about something I didn't get when I actually clicked on the link ...


It's apparently owned by a UK company called Quality Nonsense - https://qualitynonsense.com/portfolio/digital-com/ - currently featuring such insightful content as "Error establishing a database connection".


I still can't believe HP actually sold digital.com DEC / Digital is a huge part of computing history: PDP, VAX, Alpha.


The Internet Archive stopped honoring robots.txt back in 2017 because "Robots.txt meant for search engines don’t work well for web archives"

Not sure without a bit more digging whether they honor explicit rules for their crawler.

Edit: (but a little looking at comments indicates that they don't, and notes that ia_archiver is Alexa, not the Internet Archive)


Hmmm, and their robots.txt seems to not be at fault. I wonder if they excluded it to not overlap with Alta Vista, still it's tragic that digital.com isn't browsable in the wayback machine.


This may be a question of age. DEC was acquired by Compaq in 1998, then the IA was only a couple years old.




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