By Keith Devlin @KeithDevlin@fediscience.org

Devlin’s Angle turned 27 years of age at the start of this year, having launched in January 1996, as did  the MAA’s members website, originally called MAA Online (now Math Values). I devoted the January 2021, 25th anniversary Angle to providing a guide for how to find past posts, which over the years had been spread over four separate repositories, with hard-to-find links, making archive searches a challenge but not impossible.

If you check out that anniversary page, however, you will find that the first two links are now broken. Here’s what happened. (Don’t worry, the story has a happy end. But it’s a reminder of the fact that back in the 1990s, the MAA was a pioneer in the provision of online services on the then-new World Wide Web, that would go through a series of rapid changes.)

Page Not Found

In late August, I started getting emails from people who went to look up an old Devlin’s Angle post, only to get the dreaded “PAGE NOT FOUND” notice for anything posted prior to August 2011.

During that period were the two most cited, referenced, linked-to, and argued-about threads in the entire 27 years of the Angle: the series of posts on multiplication (and why it isn’t repeated addition) and the posts on the Davydov Curriculum in the then Soviet Union. Those threads were referenced regularly by teachers at both K-12 and higher education levels as well as people in other professions, engineering in particular. So the loss of that big chunk of MAA history was worrying.

[More generally, the posts that were cited most frequently were (not surprisingly) those that focused on K-12 education and, to a lesser extent, university-mathematics teaching.]

In fact, readers had been having problems locating specific posts ever since August 2011, when the MAA moved the Angle over to the BlogSpot platform, which left everything published prior to then spread over two archives. That January 2021, 25th anniversary Angle post I cited above was just the latest in a number of pointers to the archives I had provided over the years to help readers find all the previous posts, usually as a note attached to a topic-post.

But the recent August problem was more problematic: the files themselves seem to have been lost. Content-based searches no longer lead anywhere.

The problem appears to have occurred during an upgrade of the MAA website carried out during the late summer. But with retrospect, we can see that the archive had become brittle over many years, as the MAA worked to keep abreast of a rapidly changing technology landscape.

How we got here

In 1995, the MAA made the bold decision to move many of its communications from print onto what was then the new World Wide Web, a distributed, global communication platform built on top of the Internet, a network connecting together computers at universities (and some of the US government, which funded the Internet’s development). MAA Online finally launched in January 1996; one of its regular features was the new online column Devlin’s Angle.

The word “column” was a carryover from print media. I had been editor of the print magazine FOCUS, the MAA’s primary news outlet for members, since September 1991, a position I continued to hold until my last issue in December 1997. As FOCUS editor, I wrote an “Editorial” for each issue, modeled somewhat on the twice-monthly newspaper column I wrote for The Guardian national daily newspaper in my native UK from 1983 until 1989, when I opted to remain in the US after spending the two-year period 1987-1989 as a visiting faculty member at Stanford University in California. With surveys saying that my FOCUS editorial was the most read part of FOCUS (its inclusion was not without controversy, I should add), MAA asked me to write something similar, but more broad ranging, for their new online site. Devlin’s Angle was the result. (The column’s title may have been mine, but it could equally well have been suggested by the then MAA Director of Publications Don Albers, with whom I worked closely.)

Eight years later, in 2004, the MAA moved the Angle over to Google’s newly acquired platform Blogger.com (at which point what we had called a “column” became known as a “blog”). All the previous posts were archived, accessed from a link to “earlier posts” included in the Angle’s navigation panel on the new platform.

Then, in August 2011, the MAA switched from Blogger to BlogSpot—sort of. Things actually get a bit complicated here, since from a customer’s perspective, this was more a change of address rather than supplier. Blogger was/is a free publishing platform, while BlogSpot was/is a free domain service provider, and both were/are part of Google’s (acquired) blog platform. From August 2011 onwards, Google hosted blogs on their Blogger platform with a default blogspot.com domain as opposed to the previous blogger.com domain. The result was that the Angle was then spread over three domain names. A disaster waiting to happen. (Remember that Silicon Valley motto, “Move fast and break things.”) Last summer’s MAA site update somehow obliterated the first two archives (who know what server they were on?), so all the posts from the first post in January 1996 through to July 2011 were lost.

Fortunately, I still had the files I had submitted to the MAA each month for publication. Since those are, for the most part, HTML files (that’s how we did it back then!), I was able to reproduce those posts on the new archive, almost exactly as they would have originally appeared (apart from page-style issues). [The first year, 1996, was an exception, and more challenging to reconstruct, as I explain in the 1996 archive itself.]

What has been lost are any editorial changes to each post made by the MAA Online editor at the time (usually minor), and any corrections I asked to be made after publication. Some of those may have been somewhat substantive, though hopefully none were corrections to major-league-bad factual errors. Also, as the series developed over time, posts started to have accompanying photographs. On a few occasions, I still had the source images and could include them in the reconstructed archive posts. But many have been lost.

I also took advantage of re-creating those archives to add annotated indexes to make it easy to browse the entire Angle, from the very first post onwards, right through to today. And so here we are.

POSTSCRIPT: Since I published the new archive and indexes (as a new Devlin’s Angle subdomain of my profkeithdevlin.org site) a couple of weeks ago, a reader of that site pointed out that there is an archive of the “lost” first two archives on the WayBackMachine Internet Archive:
1996 to 2003: https://web.archive.org/web/20221218055621/https://maa.org/external_archive/devlin/devlin_archives.html
2004 to 2013: https://web.archive.org/web/20221218055601/https://www.maa.org/external_archive/devlin/devangle.html
I have found that at least one of the posts on the WBM archive is missing, but a quick random sample showed that most seem to be there (the contents, not the original formatting pages); I have not done a complete survey, since retrieving a particular file can be very slow.
I don’t know who created those copies; certainly not me.
Also, the archived posts have many more broken links than the ones I recreated, since I updated links when I found the originals were broken. The Web is not friendly to historians!
But the WBM source does at least provide a way to check whether each of my reconstructions missed editorial changes the MAA made to my submission, should the need arise.