The Wayback Machine is a useful tool, but I didn’t know how big or comprehensive this internet history library was or what the Internet Archive, which manages this collection, does.
A recent report says: CNN announced it many interesting facts (via PC player) via the Wayback Machine and, by extension, the Internet Archive. In short, Wayback is a time machine that allows you to go back to previous versions of websites, or, if you prefer, to a TARDIW (Time and relative size of the Internet.).
But there’s a lot more to the Wayback Machine than that and the broader activities of the Internet Archive, a nonprofit organization run by software engineers and librarians: Here’s my list of five surprising facts.
1. A billion pages of a book on the Internet
Just over a month ago, the Wayback Machine registered its billionth website, which is amazing. We are told that today this library is growing by 150 TB (or 150,000 GB) of websites every day.
2. A haven for servants
The Internet Archive is located in the Richmond district of San Francisco, USA, in a building that was once the “Fourth Church of Christ Scientist”, a truly impressive architecture with eight huge columns on the facade (it resembles the logo of the organization).
The church still has stained glass, but inside it now houses a series of servers that store valuable data for the Wayback Machine, although of course there are over a billion websites in the church. Most of the Internet Archive servers are located in a large warehouse outside of San Francisco.
The servants of the old church are symbolically housed in the building’s main sanctuary.
3. The Importance of Preserving the Internet
Keeping historical snapshots of web pages is very useful, whether those sites are run by governments, companies, other organizations, or even individual blogs. The ability to detect changes can shed light on the motives of these organizations and preserve fragments of written content that would otherwise (sooner or later) be erased from our collective memory.
When governments make changes to official websites, it can be crucial for journalists to have access to previous versions of the web pages so that they can clearly see the impact of any changes.
Eliza Digitizes Books in the Internet Archive – YouTube
4. Not just websites
The Internet Archive aims not only to preserve the history of the Internet, but also to digitize books (see above) and other media such as old records (from the 1920s), CDs, cassettes, VHS, TV shows and video games.
I was completely unaware of the variety of historical documents that the archives contained on this subject.
5. Founded by an internet pioneer
Brewer KahleFounder of the Internet Archive and Wayback Machine (2001), he was an Internet pioneer and formerly one of the creators of the precursor to the World Wide Web. It was WAIS (Wide Area Information Servers), the first distributed document search and retrieval system on the Internet.
