Travel backwards through the web with the Wayback Machine
The internet doesn’t forget. This well-known statement is only partially true. In fact, many websites go unnoticed. That’s why we’re presenting you with the internet archive, a special find. The Wayback Machine allows time travel through the internet.
It’s arguably one of the ideas most often picked up in movies, books, and TV shows: the dream of traveling backwards (and forwards, too) through time. What was it like in your own home town in the Middle Ages? Or: What will the world look like in 5,000 years?
What is possible in the science fiction universe is denied to us in reality – at least to a certain extent. Because with the help of libraries, handwritten records and old documents, we can at least guess how our ancestors lived.
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Internet Archive: A Memory of the Digital World
The problem with this: Although it is always said that the Internet does not forget, there is no documentation of what is happening in the digital realm. That’s why Brewster Bald set about setting up the first Internet archive as early as 1996.
He collected screenshots from every imaginable site and saves them for posterity. Almost 27 years later, he is no longer alone. A large team of supporters, donors, volunteers and employees help him to fill his digital library.
Wayback Machine: 99 petabytes of screenshots, audio recordings and books
And this meticulous and valuable work is taking up more and more storage space. So gives the Internet Archive on his own website to require more than 99 petabytes of storage space.
For classification: A petabyte is 1015 bytes. These are distributed as follows:
- 735 billion websites
- 41 million books and texts
- 14.7 million audio recordings including 240,000 live concerts
- 8.4 million videos
- 4.4 million images
- 890,000 software programs
Kahle makes all this content available to people around the world free of charge. His declared goal: He wants to give all those people access to knowledge who do not have access to libraries in the real world.
A journey through time through the Internet with the Wayback Machine
For all those interested in the Internet, there is also an amusing gimmick in the Internet Archive. With the so-called Wayback Machine you can make a time travel through the internet.
Specifically, you can see how over 200 million websites in more than 40 languages have changed over the decades. All you have to do is type a URL into the search bar.
Of course, this also works for BASIC thinking. The first screenshot provided is from March 12, 2003 and looks like this. If you then click through the days, months and years, you can see how we have changed over time.
Wayback Machine: Expand the internet archive with your knowledge
The more people save websites, the better our ideas about how the internet will evolve. That’s why the Internet Archive also offers Browser Extensions at.
On the one hand, they allow you to quickly and easily view the history of a website. On the other hand, you can take screenshots yourself in this way and thus contribute to the expansion of the internet archive. What are you waiting for?
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