I found this:
“Do note that this means EE 1 will automatically be retired on December 7th, 2013. From that point, it will no longer receive updates of any kind and will no longer be eligible for EllisLab Support.”
December 7th, 2013 is still ways to go and I have not been able to find the online documentation for 1.7x and the Wiki. What happened? In any event those should still be available up until December 7th, 2013!
To me one of the most valuable part were the comments submitted along with the documentation, which are not available in the download of the regular documentation.
Those comments have saved me a lot of time since they mentioned bugs, pointed out additional features, etc.
I understand there is an update path to 2.x but this is definitely not an option with highly customized 1.7 sites which I have a few of.