The Wayback Machine, a time machine for the web | CBS News
flavoursofopenscience's bookmarks 2024-06-23
Summary:
By David Pogue
David Samuel plays viola in the San Francisco-based Alexander Quartet. But he almost didn't make it into this country. "I'm a Canadian citizen," he said, "and I therefore needed a work visa if I was coming to the United States."
That artist's visa required special documentation: "I was tasked with finding old programs, articles, interviews, anything that could demonstrate that I had contributed significantly to the field," he said. Unfortunately, most of that stuff had disappeared from the internet over the years.
Then, someone suggested he check out the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. Samuel wound up finding every concert program, interview and article he needed for his visa.
The Wayback Machine has been making backups of the world wide web since 1996. Mark Graham, its director, describes it as "a time machine for the web. It does that by going and looking at webpages, hundreds of millions of them every single day right now, and stores them in our servers."
To date there are nearly 900 billion web pages backed up, though computer scientist Brewster Kahle thinks it's a cruel joke to call them "pages" considering their short lifespan: "The average life of a webpage is a hundred days before it's changed or deleted," he said.
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