Despite its name, the Wayback Machine is not a time travel machine
from a science fiction movie or from a television cartoon. Instead, it is an
archive of Internet pages.
Would you like to look at a Web page as it existed several years
ago? Perhaps you want to look for information that was available on the Web
at one time but has since disappeared? The Wayback Machine may be the tool you
need. Now you can surf the Web as it was.
The Internet Archive, working with Alexa Internet, has created
the Wayback Machine. This free service makes it possible to surf pages stored
in the Internet Archive's Web archive.
The Wayback Machine currently contains over 100 terabytes of data
and is growing at a rate of 12 terabytes per month. (A terabyte is 1,000 gigabytes
or one million megabytes.) The Wayback Machine is the largest known database
in the world, containing multiple copies of the entire publicly available Web.
That is one huge disk farm!
The Wayback Machine was unveiled on 24 October at Berkeley's Bancroft
Library. I used it this week to look at some Web pages that I have been maintaining
for years, some of which are not connected with genealogy. It was interesting
to look at some of my older HTML work. I also looked at some of today’s more
popular genealogy Web sites. I must say that Ancestry.com has come a long way
from their home page of 28 October 1996.
The Wayback Machine stores all the text of standard HTML pages.
Graphic images may or may not be stored. Fancier Web pages, using XML or Javascript,
probably will not be found In the Wayback Machine.
You can search the 100-terabyte Web archive on The Wayback Machine
at: www.archive.org/
Dick Eastman Online
