The Internet’s Scrapbook

Gnomie Dan Butler writes:

Hi, Chris!

Thought I’d share a Web site that I find super useful. It is easy for me to assume that you already know about all the cool, useful sites, but I’m often surprised by the things that slip through the cracks — even by the most Web-savvy folks I know.

This week Archive.org came up as a solution to several challenges we encountered. Any way you look at the site is just plain interesting. Movies, pictures, audio, text, software, and more. All of it free and all of it legal. You can spend a lot of time just getting acclimated to the place.

The last time I visited the site it was highlighting the commercials for the family computer — the Commodore 64 and video of Carnival at the 1941 Mardi Gras in New Orleans. Those topics may not be of immediate interest to you, but they are examples of the variety of content you will find at the Archive.

Maybe the coolest section of Archive.org is the WayBack Machine. Here is what T.J. Lee wrote in TNPC about the WayBack Machine back in 2001:

“Sherman, set the WayBack Machine to Version 1.0 and hang on! Gee, Mr. Peabody, look at that old Web page! Okay, the Rocky and Bullwinkle references may be lost on a lot of you but by golly this is just something you don’t see everyday, Chauncy.

The WayBack Machine page by the Internet Archive. This page relies in part on Alexa Internet to serve up pages from the past. Type in a familiar URL and you can look at what was displayed at this address in days of yore. I tried it with The Naked PC site and cracked up to see some of the old formats we used as we tried to come up with a look we liked that was easily maintained. Or take a look at Microsoft’s home page circa 1996. Fun stuff.”

One of my favorite uses for the WayBack Machine is to locate lost Web pages/sites. You know how it is. You are clicking through a site and start coming across “File Not Found pages. Next time that happens to you head over to the WayBack Machine. Most of the time you will find exactly what you are looking for.

You can find the Internet Archive here, and you’ll see the WayBack machine near the top of the page.

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