>  A while back jim bell claimed to first notice that a good chunk of the archive from the 1990s was missing. The topic was discussed and nothing come it.

Agreed, nothing became of it.  I felt that I had alerted the current users of Cypherpunks.

 >jim bell spouted his usual technocratic garbage about how 'somebody' must have a copy of the archive on floppy disks, bla bla but of course none of the old subscribers (who are still subscribed like john young, hettinga, james donald, mirimir, etc) ever produced a backup. They never commented on the reasons why parts of the archive are missing.

No, I don't recall saying anything about "floppy disks".  It's obvious that by 1995, every CP subscriber would have been running on hard disks, probably of a capacity of a few hundred megabytes.  The "floppy disk' thing is just your own nonsense.

 By today, such hard disks would presumably have been retired 2-3 times.   But I figure that many people would put the retired disk into a closet, a basement, or an attic, so there's nothing unreasonable about thinking that the data is still available, if somebody has the motivation to search for it.  

  >  After a while jim bell stopped talking about the issue. I'd say he stopped talking about it all of a sudden.

Was there anything more to say?      I don't think it was "all of a sudden".   More nonsense by you.  

                Jim Bell