A Time Machine for the Internet?

What is The Internet Archive and Wayback Machine?

The Internet Archive was founded by Brewster Kahle, an Internet pioneer and computer programmer who helped to develop WAIS (Wide Area Information System), a text-based precursor to the World Wide Web. Kahle and others founded WAIS, Inc., to commercialize the text-searching technology; their clients included Ross Perot’s 1992 Presidential campaign, the EPA, the Library of Congress, the Dept. of Energy, the Wall Street Journal, and Encyclopedia Britannica.

WAIS, Inc., was sold to AOL in 1995 (which is why you've probably never heard of it) and Kahle went on to found The Internet Archive and the Alexa web stats service (not to be confused with Amazon’s Alexa virtual assistant).

The front-end to this massive library is the Wayback Machine (which fans of Dr. Peabody and Sherman will recognize). It allows journalists, researchers, and the nostalgically curious to search for older versions of Web pages, even if the pages no longer exist on the Web. If you want to see what Yahoo.com looked like in October 1996, or view snapshots of WhiteHouse.gov over time, it's in there.

It also allows one to submit a web page address (URL) for archiving, and get a URL that will work even if the page is deleted or moved from its original site. These permanent links are increasingly important. Web URLs have gained widespread acceptance as citations in students’ term papers, Ph. D. dissertations, scientific research publications, even court filings and opinions. A “404 - not found” error is a big deal in a legal document, and the Wayback Machine helps avoid such problems. The Wayback Machine can search for archived copies of a missing page given its now-errant URL.

To make finding a lost page even easier, a browser extension is available for Chrome, or Edge, and an addon for Firefox. Once installed, it automatically searches the IA every time you run into one of the various "page not found" errors your browser may return when you try to fetch a web page. (In tech terms, that would be an error number 404, 408, 410, 451, 500, 502, 503, 504, 509, 520, 521, 523, 524, 525, or 526). If archived copies of the page are found, a notification window lets you choose whether to explore them.

But Wait, There's More!

The Internet Archive isn't just about Web pages, though. As part of its lofty goal "to provide Universal Access to All Knowledge," the folks at IA are busily scanning books into its databases, much like Google Books does. It also preserves copies of old video games (and the emulators need to play an Atari game on a PC), software, music, movies, videos, and even animated GIFs.

Some IA rabbit holes you may want to explore are the Internet Archive TV News, which has clips from almost 3 million TV news shows since 2009; the Movies page, which has full-length feature films, classic shorts and movie trailers; and the Cover Art Archive which has music album cover art images.

It's worth your time to browse the "Top Collections at the Archive," where you'll fund curated collections related to a wide variety of interests including Old Time Radio, MS-DOS Games, old magazines, and dozens of esoteric topics.

The headquarters of Internet Archive are located in the former Fourth Church of Christ, Scientist, a neoclassic building with Greek columns on Funston Avenue, in Richmond District, San Francisco, California. As of September 2024, the IA held over 145 petabytes of data. A petabyte is one million gigabytes. Wow.

One thing that was new since my last visit was Electric Sheep, a collection of animated and evolving fractal flames that make great screensavers. Let me know what you find there!

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