Internet time machine

I recently discovered something that drew my interest on the web. It's something that puts me back in time when I was still searching the web using Infoseek and Webcrawler and ocassionally Altavista; Yahoo! was still relatively unknown then and Google wasn't born yet.

Called the Wayback Machine (web.archive.org), it is an archive of captured webpages from various sites that were posted years ago. It's not like an online cache system that will change everytime; it's like photographing the website and capturing the source code and storing it somewhere. Without storing the images (I guess it only stores html file), one drawback is that when images are no longer where they used to reside, spots of broken images litter across the web page landscape. But to me it's still good enough as the layout is still pretty much intact and I marveled the early coders who maintain image size width and height (img src="" width="" height="").

To view your selected site, simply type in the URL and results are displayed neatly by year, usually starting in around 1996. Linked date displays are instances when the site has been updated.

Looking at the older versions of CNN (look at its coverage on September 11 2001 WTC bombing), NBA (interview with rookie Lorenzen Wright and interview with Knicks star Larry Johnson), ESPN amazed me on how they transformed their websites from simplistic and over reliant on animated gifs and Java applets to Flash and DHTML. I got a glimpse of my previously favorite website in Discovery.com.

However, not all sites are covered. If robots are not allowed to scour over the site, then there is no page to visit. A few other reasons spoil us from viewing what we used to see in sites a decade ago.

Neat!