Back in the days, a large floppy disk used to hold enough knowledge. COBOL and Clipper, like ancient spells, allowed inanimate minerals to think and remember. DOS was its Digital Old Soul. It sang like a small chirping bird, beeping and screeching: you could literally hear it thinking. The portal to the digital world, made of pure glass, weighted a dozen kilograms. Web was a literal Mosaic of a gleeful youth. Everything smelled like a classic library book, scented by cigarettes.
Quod abiit, abiit. Some things never come back. Whenever you try to access that URL again, you can see a number, like a registration plaque next to the grave:
410
It's gone. Cigarettes have long since turned to ash, and ashes always fall down. Beeps are no longer echoing: even the memories are buried with those who were alive enough to appreciate the song. The Web mosaic became a labyrinth where Minotaur haunts everywhere. DOS became a synonym for Decayed Obituary Sarcophagus. COBOL would still invoke the ancient knowledge, if such knowledge had not been forgotten long ago: everything just became, like a highly-lossy compression, a single ASCII character trio:
410
The glass became plastic, now plastic is everywhere (oh, microplastics!), like a world taken by Fake Plastic Trees. The stone, once capable of thinking, became an inanimate stone again, buried under ashes and, of course, under the endless sea of plastic.
Quod abiit, abiit: what's gone, is gone.