>an entire season is not the same thing as being able to view just a single episode.

Even from your own archive?

Originally many people started out with plain paper terminals rather than the spiffy video terminals that would later become common.

Well, sprocket-feed terminals more precisely, where you sit at a floor-standing wide-carriage _printer_ having a full QWERTY/ASCII keyboard, connected to the mainframe using a RS-232 serial COM port cable.

Or remotely dial-up over regular phone lines using external modems compatible with the kind first used for internet dial-up. Modems later found internally as standard equipment on PC's, made to accept a common RJ-11 telephone connector, eliminating the need for the RS-232 cable.

Not unlike a space-age teletype.

Either way, you type to the computer and it types back to you.

When available, as we all know it's been a while and computers still can never be expected to have 100 percent uptime, so time shifting has always been the norm in some way or another. At this point with a dumb terminal you just come back later when the mainframe is not too busy for input, or for output just wait for the printout until it's good and ready.

More effective session management would have to be accomodated by storage of some kind not unlike the punched paper tapes for sending and receciving on some teletypes.

Underneath the terminal you have a big box of the fan-feed computer paper so you fundamentally get an endless record of the communication in its entirety. Otherwise there is nothing. This is the default. Out-of-paper meant no communication and no data.

Pallets and pallets of boxes and boxes of printouts, excessive amounts of trees giving their lives and paper mill pollution up the wazoo (you ever smell that stuff?). But it's worth it, these are not copies, this is the original data, as you received it coming in live over the wire.

Depending on the institution or individual, and the risk of losing this unique output, archival handling procedures may apply.

Upgrading to a VT-102 type video terminal is actually analogous to a desktop PC when it comes to form factor, but the command line is still not from a local processor, and no local disk storage.

Naturally you still get your continuous printout as the screen display scrolls it on by, now possible from a plain serial printer (or from the same old paper terminal) connected to the second COM port on the VT-102 for pass-through printing.

You still use the terminal to operate the command line & display the output from a remote CPU, and with scrolling ability, can roll back to redisplay some recent earlier content. This was not a copy either, it was the same original live data as printed, just redisplayed. Not every terminal had that kind of memory though, and if present, not much.

Then you get _intelligent_ terminals with lots more memory plus local floppy storage, having more than two COM ports, and a simple local OS in ROM to handle these peripherals.

It finally became posible to judiciously save paper like never before, from that point on there has always been a local SAVE command of some kind. That's one of the only main purposes of any mainstream desktop workstation ever since.

You end up with a stack of floppies instead of paper containing the original data from that hardware session.

Interestingly, even today it is sometimes still faster to look something up in your paper records than find it on a disk though.

Anyway the disks simply have digital representation specifically crafted for the storage medium, often in appropriately treated text files.

From that point you could always play back data from a disk to your console screen, and/or one or more of the COM ports which may be connected to other terminals, computers, storage, or printing hardware. When the time is right.

The purpose of putting data into a computer file format to begin with is precisely so this type of communication can be achieved electronically.

And also, so the file or disk can be archived using one of the only non-communication commands in such a pre-DOS desktop environment, the ominous-sounding COPY command.

Well, it's electronic and you need to keep the original completely intact, so no telling how many times you need to run the COPY command to get a reliable archive.

But when one of the things that came across your wires is something like the text of The Godfather, that's an author's original work and it would be most questionable to manufacture copies for people as if it were your own creation, perhaps unfair even if proper attribution is given.

Each user has always been responsible for appropriately respecting the rights owners of any material in their archive, and questioning their own operation enough to avoid things like selling duplicates to just anyone. It's part of the responsibility of having such powerful equipment at their disposal.

Not just for those with dual floppy drives. Takes lots of floppy disks to boot sometimes too. Twenty years ago most PC's already came equipped with two CD drives in addition to a floppy drive, one CD drive was writable for archiving since floppies were not too popular any more.

MP3 sites earlier than Napster arose without question as experimenters compressed and shared their archives using the emerging codec. This was nothing like selling pirated copies of CD's, and was not made available to the general public by any means, just the few technology enthusiasts who had PC's with internet capability.

With progress in hardware and internet performance, there should be more advantage for archival use as time goes by.

Now exponentially more good material is at risk of being lost due to electronic or legislative failures, beyond the pre-existing threats from ordinary disasters like floods or acts of war. There's also the limitations of things like MP3 compression.

There should continuously be improving apps so users can work more effectively than ever with the desired portions out of their own complete digital history.

Meanwhile there is some consensus that operators without your permission are clandestinely eavesdropping to make truly illegal copies of your original complete digital history (along with many others') and extract portions that they my find desirable, sometimes against your own best interest.

You surely need to be entitled to better than this, and in favor of your own preferences instead.

In the USA according to copyright law archiving is not supposed to be impossible.

Nobody has a continuous paper record to fall back on any more.

Any threat to the usefulness of your digital equivalent would seem to be a form of cyberattack now that we have a better idea of how a cyberattack can do damage.

It's always been the same tool with possible uses for good or evil, the desktop workstation.

What you primarily do with it can only be determined by examination of its complete digital history.

From an entertainment law perspective it would seem like the only sensible violation could be if illegal entertainment had actually ocurred, not whether the file was being stored locally or remotely.

If most of the files just sit there almost all the time, with almost no dancing to the computer or anything like that, that's an archival device not an entertainment device.

Even more so when the primary user handling of the files is to maintain them intact against all odds, without ever intentionally using the file contents to achieve the files' own particular underlying purpose, whether entertainment files or not.