Yes, the Goodell monorail. The first commercial monorail (and basis of all modern monorails operating in the world today) was invented by Houston businessman Murel Goodell. Yet on the internet, he's practically a ghost.<p>If you asked 100 people who invented the monorail, most would say, "Walt Disney." Disneyland's straddle-beam monorail was invented by Goodell and was his second-generation design. The first design which ran in Dallas four years before Disneyland's was a suspended type.<p>I'm in the process of starting an online Goodell Monorail Museum precisely to fix this problem. I've collected hundreds of documents and photos from archival sources which have never been seen on the internet.
FidoNet archives: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12216932" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12216932</a> At its peak in the mid 90's it must have contained millions of messages and thousands of groups. Then internet took over and FidoNet disappeared. Archives of messages from this time period is nowhere to be found.
Sure, designing quantitative trading strategies. That’s the easiest example I can think of. There’s basically nothing public out there (that actually works).<p>To a lesser extent, certain types of datasets can’t be found on the internet either. They may exist digitally, but they’ll never be sent across public networks.
When I was translating, many dictionaries were not available in any electronic format. General dictionaries usually were, but dictionaries on specialist topics usually had been produced by small teams many years ago and were out of print.