Way Back Machine

“Universal access to human knowledge”…

The Internet Archive is a mass storage of all webpage’s created, letting the user view a certain webpage back throughout the years. E.g. www.mircosoft.com in 1996: http://web.archive.org/web/*hh_/microsoft.com/

www.archive.org was founded in San Francisco back in 1996 as a non profit organization. Its main purpose was for historians, scholars and researchers to have access to a historical collection of web pages. As the word spread, archive.org is now famous within the general public. To this day archive.org has collected over 30 billion pages, which are all available at a click of a button. From the day this site was born it has became a massive chunk of data and to many, is like visiting a museum of historical artifacts.

“The Internet Archive is working to prevent the Internet — a new medium with major historical significance — and other "born-digital" materials from disappearing into the past” (Internet Archive).

This new method of information gathering will help historians study how the history of the World Wide Web has changed this world in an economic and social manner.

“With a way-back machine — a device that displayed the Web as it looked on a given date — historians and others would literally have a window on the past” (Internet Archive).

Internet Archive has many tools for a researcher to use, but the main reason someone from the general public would visit the site is to see what a website looked like at a certain time. Archive.org has named this feature, The Internet Archive Wayback Machine (IAWM).

Currently the IAWM has stored over 120 terabytes of information… That’s about 819.2 times all The LAN Mine's pc hard drives put together.

Well if the IAWM can record almost all the web pages, it must have something on lanmine.net, right? The first official Lanmine.net page was recorded on the 26th of March 2003. – “'The LAN Mine' network games centre will provide affordable, fun, group activities for the youth of Albury Wodonga. You are invited to round up some friends and play the latest computer games, on the latest equipment, in a virtual multiplayer battlefield. Organised tournaments will allow you to prove your skills in a battle to decide the last man standing. The LAN Mine is a drug and alcohol free zone, which will provide a safe hangout. The LAN Mine will introduce a new form of digital entertainment, which has presently not been seen on the border. The LAN Mine is scheduled to open it's doors on the 1st of April 2003. Watch this site for the latest news!”.

I suggest if you’re a webmaster and want to make sure that your site is documented for others to see in future, visit: http://pages.alexa.com/help/webmasters/index.html#crawl_site

Archive.org relies only on donations and a helping hand from 100’s of people around the world. Australia has its own archiving site which is based a little differently than this. http://pandora.nla.gov.au is the Aussie version, which was founded back in 1996 along with Archive.org.

Check out both sites! It’s not only educational but fun, as you can see how far we have come in only a few years.