The Wayback Machine - https://web.archive.org/web/20260507012112/https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-republican-wayback-machine-shows-i/191950670/
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'Wayback Machine' shows Internet as it was

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PERSONAL TECHNOLOGY • * 'Wayback Machine® * 7 AT shows - Internet as it was By ALLAN HOFFMAN Newhouse News Service As a tool for archiving information, the Internet is a wonder, especially in its ability to make a variety of materials, from magazine articles to video clips, accessible to people around the world. But the Internet hasn't always been up to the job of archiving itself. That's changing, with the launch of the Wayback Machine, a repository of Web pages from the Internet Archive (www.archive.org), a nonprofit based in San Francisco. With the Wayback Machine, you can surf the Web as it was. Which means, in practical terms, the chance for researchers, historians and others to gaze back in time at snapshots of Web sites such as ESPN.com, Lycos or even out-of-business companies like Webvan.com. "Wayback," it should be noted, means way back to 1996. "Without cultural artifacts, civilization has no memory, and no mechanism to learn from its successes and failures," according to the site. "The Internet Archive is working to prevent the Internet - a new medium with major historical significance and other 'born-digital' materials - from disappearing into the past." The archive is especially significant now. As part of its launch, the site is offering a special collection of pages covering the Sept. 11 attacks and their aftermath. Available at september11.archive.org, the collection is divided into religious sites, charities, volunteers, media and other categories. Without the archive, many of these pages - nonprofits and personal home pages in particular - likely would have disappeared. Now, not only have they been preserved, but they're available for others to view and, in the future, for scholars to ponder. Not everything at the Internet Archive, of course, is related to * Sept. 11. Another collection, * Web Pioneers, brings together an assortment of archived sites, from Amazon.com to Yahoo, that are considered trailblazers in the development of the Internet. If you want to get a sense of how primitive e-commerce was just five years ago, take a look at the Amazon.com home page from Oct. 22, 1996. The page design is bare- bones - just text with a few book covers thrown in here and there. The Amazon.com logo looks like something crafted by a student in a computer illustration class. The Internet Archive is an evolving project, dedicated to archiving all sorts of cultural artifacts. As such, it has a hodgepodge of materials, some of them rather quirky. For instance, you might want to check out the anthology of 956 films from the Prelinger Archive. These include such gems as "Dating: Do's and Don'ts," an instructional film for teen-agers from 1949, and "Understanding Your Ideals," a film from the same era about honesty and sportsmanship. Now that's really taking you way| back. Think,
Article from 03 Dec 2001The Republican(Springfield, MA)
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