Happy 20th birthday WayBack machine and thanks Brewster for starting Internet Archive almost 25 years ago
Posted by jpluimers on 2021/10/24
Today, 20 years ago, the Wayback Machine started to unlock the archived content that the Internet Archive had been crawling since 1996 and make it accessible for the public at large.
Thanks Brewster Kahle for making all of this possible for such a long time!
WayBack machine 20th anniversary coming up – Press _ Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming _ Internet Archive
The press coverage back then was really small: https://archive.org/details/press00unse_6. With 1up, it is easier to read: archive.org/details/press00unse_6/page/n6/mode/1up
FORGET ME NOT
Where do old Web pages go to die? If they’re lucky, the Internet Archive, a nonprofit project to preserve the history of the Web. The archive recently marked its fifth birthday by launching the Wayback Machine (web.archive.org). Type any URL into this free service, and you can see what the page looked like in the old days (1996). The archive has already devoted a special collection to the Sept. 11 attacks.
I snipped the above press release URL from the anniversary page (which oddly cannot be archived on web.archive.org: it fails, just like web.archive.org/save/https://archive.org/details/press00unse_6/page/n6/mode/1up ):
Oct 24 2001 Go Wayback
Wayback Machine unveiled at the University of California at Berkeley
The Internet Archive launches the Wayback Machine, a free service allowing people to go “back in time” and see how websites looked in the past.
By 2001, the Internet Archive had amassed a large archive of web pages, including web data captured by their own crawlers starting in 1996.
At the time of its public launch in 2001, the Wayback Machine provided access to more than 10 billion web pages and 100 terabytes of data.
SOURCES New Economy, John Schwartz. (2001, October 29). https://archive.org/details/press00unse_6/page/n6/mode/2up | Wayback Machine. https://web.archive.org/web/20011202145626/http://www.waybackmachine.org/
IMAGE SOURCE Image of the Wayback Machine logo by the Internet Archive
The impact was lasting.
More anniversary news at [Archive.is] anniversary.archive.org
–jeroen
Related: [Archive.is] Jeroen Wiert Pluimers on Twitter: “Hi @brewster_kahle, first congrats on the almost 25th anniversary, and second: can the timeline items at anniversary.archive.org become individually addressable (and with that: archivable)? That would make announcing them them during the various anniversary events easier. Thanks!”
The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff 
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