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WayBack Machine is archive.org

Feb 24, 2008 5 comments
I'm kind of overwhelmed by the broader technologies ever being introduced every single moment. Sometimes, I feel it's too much and while relaxing, when I gaze at my empty ceiling, I ponder upon the wonderful feelings of those days when everything was so new, so simple, when Internet was just about to get explode. Back in those days, when Internet is all about only and only HTML. It was great attempt to show my friends how I linked a mere page to another page full with unstructured display of images. Everything was so simple yet so hard to learn. Things are different now. Everything is dynamic, innumerous technologies are there to back today's connected world. See the pics below, that's how Yahoo looked exactly in the month of Nov, 1996. Yahoo had it's user database and interface all in html language. No complex scripts at all.
Yahoo.com, 1996


The objective of this post is to discuss about one site which is taking snapshots of history in digital formats. The above snapshots that I 'PRTSC' - PrintScreened is from http://www.archive.org

While we are being accustomed to newer technology everyday, archive.org has been silently taking snapshots of all of those moments,events. I could actually find the historic reposits of all kind of data which is over 40-50 years old. Those data could be of immense value to researchers,historians,students,scholars and equally to all those enthusiasts who wonder how the world looked back then in those days but all in digital formats.

Precisely, archive.org has one section out of many which is called "Way Back Machine" where you input some URL of today's popular sites and you can check actually, how it looked way back then. That's how I got above figure 'Yahoo in Nov,1996'. Pretty amusing right?? If you want to know why it's way back machine, please refer this wiki.
So, what you can do with this Way Back Machine? You can learn about how these big corporate has come to this stage and how they looked back on those days. You can view the source code and study them. It's kind of interesting thing you know? I spent around 4 hours yesterday to find myself about How great it is to know about history.

If you are thinking it's all about technology stuff, please change your mind. Of course, it's the technology that archive.org is built upon and that technology will tell you the history of entire mankind, you can learn for free, you can download free softwares(which is paid back then and costly),download historic games, listen to lectures from reputed professors, lots of study materials, educational stuffs and more. It's all about learning new things from the history. Old is always gold. We've a base, a foundation and that base we can actually find in archive.org.

According to site itself:
"The Internet Archive is a 501(c)(3) non-profit that was founded to build an Internet library, with the purpose of offering permanent access for researchers, historians, and scholars to historical collections that exist in digital format. Founded in 1996 and located in the Presidio of San Francisco, the Archive has been receiving data donations from Alexa Internet and others. In late 1999, the organization started to grow to include more well-rounded collections. Now the Internet Archive includes texts, audio, moving images, and software as well as archived web pages in our collections. "

Please if you find something interesting in it, let me know too. It's so huge that I can't actually get all the useful stuffs by my own.


Thank you for reading.

Comments

Anonymous said…
What if I got separated from Internet,Uhhh..too dangerous thinking..I would be made detached from mero guff, if such happened.Will mero guff forget me in that case ? I don't know whether I would always get a chance to be with internet or not, but i will always with mero guff .
Mike said…
What a great blog. Yeah I remember when Yahoo was easy to load.

I still use a dial-up and all pages now take forever to come on the screen.

I like simple pages as you can tell from my blogs. ha
Anonymous said…
nice to see that prena and speed were the contributers since the starting of mero guff through archieve.org...the previous mero guff was too cute and simple..this present one is quite sophisticated..
Navin said…
Ametya Ji, I would never forget my friends and thanks a lot for your kind words of appreciation


Mike, I like annoyances part of your blog, it helps me relieve to same extent. and thank you for your kind words too :)
Navin said…
Ametya Ji, I was abused of being feminine with that look of my blog back on those days :)

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