Travel in Time with the Wayback Machine

Daniel Petri

Jan 8, 2009

A couple of days ago I wanted to re-read some information that I once used to have on my old website (the one prior to this current site, for those of you who have been here and remember). I searched all my hard disk’s archives, loaded a bunch of old CDs and backup hard drives, yet failed to find the required information anywhere on them.
I thought it was all lost.
Then I remembered one of my favorite Web sites – The Internet Archive.
The Internet Archive allows you to browse through 85 billion web pages archived from 1996 to a few months ago. It is a public nonprofit corporation that was founded to build an “Internet library.” The library is intended to offer permanent access for researchers, historians, and scholars to historical collections that exist in digital format.
To start surfing the Wayback, type in the web address of a site or page where you would like to start, and press enter. Then select from the archived dates available. The resulting pages point to other archived pages at as close a date as possible.

Use your Web browser to surf to http://web.archive.org.
In the Wayback Machine field enter the URL of the Web site you want to access. You can use any valid Web address (and this is the cool part – including ones that no longer exist).

Click the “Take Me Back” button to start your journey back through time. This will produce a table of search results organized by date.

In this table you can find dates and links to archived versions of the site for these dates. You simply click on one of the date links to open the URL you entered as it appeared on that date. An asterisk next to a date indicates that the page was changed on that date.

Most of the content from the Web sites should be available but many images (especially images dated before 1999) might not be present.
Behold, I found what I was looking for. Remember that page I used to have about the Israeli-Arab conflict? Well here it is:

And if we’re at it, remember that Transcender bully that threatened me and my (once) free Windows NT 4 MCSE practice tests? It seems that my success has threatened their products, and if you remember he threatened to sue me if I did not stop providing the practice tests for free. Here is the page that announced this:

And here is the page full of reader feedbacks:

Nice piece of history, huh?