The Wayback Machine is a Web site that enables anyone
to see what a particular Web site looked like at some time in the past -
from 1996 to the present. This enormous archive of the Web's past requires
over 100 terabytes of storage and contains 10 billion Web pages! The archive
of pages was originally gathered by the owners of the Alexa program, a toolbar
you can install on your PC that provides Web site information and ratings.
At the Wayback Machine site, you can search for and link to any of your
favorite Web sites of the past and find them preserved very much as they
were at various "snapshots" in time. For example, you can see
how whatis.com looked in late 1996 and also at various times during 1997
and all the way to the present. (Occasionally, an ad that was served from
another site will be missing and we noticed a few graphic images missing
from our original site.) In general, however, the range and completeness
of the archive is remarkable.
|
