Web.Art's Nature: Wayback Machine

[anna balint]

[I looked up the wayback machine, it works. Another valuable resource is the
 browser museum at http://browsers.evolt.org/.  Archiving does not freeze development -
it marks it. greetings, ab]
 
steps of evolution greetings, ab]


INTERNET ARCHIVE WAYBACK MACHINE ENABLES USERS TO ACCESS ARCHIVED
VERSIONS OF WEB SITES DATING FROM 1996

SAN FRANCISCO, CA -- The Internet Archive, a comprehensive library
of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form,
has launched the WAYBACK MACHINE, a free service allowing people
to access and use archived versions of past web pages. The site
enables searching and viewing of an enormous collection of web
sites, dating back to 1996 and comprising over 10 billion web
pages.
 
The service, which was unveiled at the  University of California at 
Berkeley's Bancroft Library, is available at web.archive.org

To use the Wayback Machine, visitors simply type in a URL in the
provided search box, select a date, and then begin surfing on an
archived version of the web.

"In 1996, we created the Internet Archive because we felt it was
critical to preserve a permanent record of this historically
significant  new medium for the public," said Internet Archive
founder Brewster Kahle. "To date, the Archive has catalogued over
ten billion web pages that might otherwise have been lost, giving
us both a record of the origins and evolution of the Internet, as
well as snapshots of our society as a whole around the turn of the
century. For our fifth anniversary, we are opening up the Archive
to the public by launching the Wayback Machine, so that everyone
can travel back in time and view the Internet as it was in the
past-and as it matures into the future."

Collaborating with institutions including the Library of Congress
and the Smithsonian Institution, the Internet Archive's
comprehensive library of the Web's digital past comprises 100
terabytes of data and is growing at a rate of 10 terabytes per
month.

"By keeping an historical record of what Web sites looked like
and how they evolved over time, the Internet Archive is an
invaluable resource for journalism educators, academic researchers
and people who just want to see how the media and our culture
marked important historical events," said Paul Grabowicz, Director
of the New Media Program and Assistant Dean at Northgate UC
Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. "Now, thanks to the
Archive's new  Wayback Machine, everyone has the opportunity to
revisit, study and enjoy these important 'first drafts of history'."

For artists who have changed and expanded the information on their
web sites over the years, the site allows an interesting look at a
process which they themselves may not have documented.

Sources/resources:

THE WAYBACK MACHINE -- http://web.archive.org