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Thursday April 6, 2006

Way Back Machine

I remember reading (or maybe Jeb told me; that's kind of like reading) something about a website that archived past versions of web pages. That way you could go back and see what web pages used to look like last century. At lunch today we were talking about out-of-date web pages and I mentioned the Way Back Machine (which I remembered being the name of the site, but it is not the URL). At this point it was pointed out to me that the original Way Back Machine was how Mr. Peabody would go back in time on an old cartoon. Then we tried to remember whether Mr. Peabody was the dog or the other person and which one wore glasses (the dog did) and what the person's name was . . .

Anyway, I found www.webarchive.org pretty quickly. I was hoping they would have some links to some of the most popular or interesting websites, but they pretty much leave it to you to look up URL's and then they show you a list of archived pages of that site from different times. They did have one section of archived websites from September 11, 2001 that seemed like it would be interesting. But I entered GDOT's URL to see what they had and even found some of the very first web pages that I had ever written, long since modified or deleted on my own computer.

Then I looked for mac.fiveforks.com and found stuff from way back in 2003, before blogs, when the site was called FOKAJ (in the title, FOJAK on the page itself). It doesn't seem to save large pictures, or maybe it just isn't saving pictures at all unless they are still in the original location. And the blogs don't work well because they use separate style sheets that are not captured.


Comments (1)

I may have told you about The Way Back Machine. Visiting Harland's old websites is fun. The Feb 2003 for mac.fiveforks.com coincides with me installing MacOSX and pressing the button "Turn on web server." I had no idea that Apache was loading up in the background at that moment and my old iMac was on the web. One of many pivotal Mac moments in my Mac history.

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