There actually are organizations and historians attempting to collect computer devices, from the old Crays and Eniacs to newer items like PalmPilots and iMacs. The LA Times article also describes attempts to archive the constantly changing Internet. Alexa has crawled the Internet seven times since 1996, but there is much web history before then that has been lost. I bet the organizations and individuals who first had web sites haven’t saved their original postings either. There was a project that archived the 1996 presidential sites, which I suppose has some historical value, though I’d rather we kept track of the more nebulous things that won’t be chronicled in history books. For example, what were people first buying off of the Internet (books at Amazon?). And how much email was sent in 1990 vs 2000? The Internet landscape changes so quickly that most data is historical before it even gets tabulated.