Narrative Provenance
The Petribyte is the definitive fossil. During The Triage, when an archaeologist examines an Archaeobyte and finds that its function is not just dormant but extinct—that it cannot be executed, played, or interpreted in the current ecosystem without archaeological intervention (emulation, translation, or contextual reconstruction)—it is classified as Petrified.
Like geological fossils where organic matter is replaced by minerals over eons, the Petribyte has been transformed by the "minerals" of technological change. What remains is the form, but the function is stone.
Two Categories of Petrifaction
Tangible Petribytes: The Format Fossil
These are files whose proprietary formats or required plugins have become extinct.
Example: The RealPlayer .rm file (1998)
A .rm video file from the early streaming wars is perfectly preserved as data—the bytes exist, the file is intact. But the "minerals" of technological change have petrified it completely. RealPlayer's proprietary codec is deprecated. Modern browsers don't support it. No native ecosystem remains to interpret it. It is a fossil of the streaming wars, a time when companies competed to own the protocols of online video.
Conceptual Petribytes: The Cultural Ghost
These are behaviors, functions, or platform concepts that have become artifacts. You cannot "find" them as single files—you excavate the concept from thousands of instances.
Example: The AIM Away Message (1997-2011)
The Away Message is one of the most profound conceptual fossils of the synchronous web. Its entire purpose was to broadcast one crucial piece of information: "I am not at my keyboard right now."
This was the era before mobile internet, when presence was binary: online or offline. The Away Message was the liminal state between them. Users crafted them with care—song lyrics, cryptic notes, simple declarations ("brb, dinner")—turning them into a sub-genre of digital poetry.
Upon triage, its state is Petrified. The entire concept is a fossil. The "minerals" of technological change—the shift from desktop-based synchronous chat to mobile-first asynchronous messaging and the "always-on" assumption of the smartphone—have completely petrified it.
The modern ecosystem is "always-on." There is no "away." The Away Message has no function because the problem it solved (managing synchronous presence) is extinct.
The Human Story: What Petribytes Tell Us
The Away Message is a fossil of a lost social contract: it was perfectly acceptable to be "away." This is the shift sociologist Sherry Turkle defines as moving "from conversation to connection"—where the nuance of presence was replaced by the binary of availability.
Petribytes prove that a different web—one that respected a user's absence as much as their engagement—was not only possible, but existed.
Other Examples
- Flash .swf files: Playable only through archived players/emulators. The ecosystem (Adobe Flash) is extinct as of 2020.
- The Webring: A conceptual fossil. The practice of curated, circular link networks died with algorithmic discovery.
- The Blogroll: A sidebar of links to peer blogs. Extinct with the rise of centralized social media platforms.
- IRC protocols: Still technically functional, but the cultural context and mainstream usage is fossilized.
Field Notes
Archive Path: Petrified Archaeobytes are preserved in the Archive as Wisdom. They are the "fossils of function" analyzed for the lessons they hold. They are primary texts that prove alternative design philosophies existed.
Re-animation Note: A Petribyte can become an Umbrabyte through emulation development. Projects like Ruffle (Flash emulator) or Internet Archive's browser emulators can restore technical function, moving artifacts from "extinct" to "liminal." But cultural context often remains petrified.
The Wisdom of Fossils
Petribytes are not simply "broken files." They are evidence of roads not taken. They document design decisions, social contracts, and technical architectures that were abandoned, crushed, or made obsolete.
By studying Petribytes, archaeologists can ask: What was lost? What was sacrificed? What wisdom did we bury?
The Rosetta Stone
The Petribyte is the Rosetta Stone of the discipline. It is the key to decoding the values, constraints, and possibilities of a lost world. By analyzing these "fossils of function," we recover the blueprints for alternative digital futures—futures that were technically possible but socially abandoned.