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 webslinky: internet archives
This week, Ye Olde Internet. W3 cheers for The Internet Archive. Any operation whose motto is "universal access to human knowledge" has got to be pretty ambitious. And slightly haughty.Constantly updated and growing at a rate of 12 terabytes every month, Archive.org is probably best known for its Wayback Machine, the closest we'll get to an internet time-travel device. Just enter a URL and see what's been captured - look back at Collective not long after it first went interactive, for instance, or the many entertaining versions of the eToy Corporation homepage, Or YouTube when it was only available in black and white. Unfortunately, the snapshots taken by the Wayback Machine aren't very deep. Most of the time only the front page of a site is archived, not the whole thing, so you're only really able to get a taste of the past, not a chance to relive it. But that's not to say the past is entirely lost. There's still an ancient internet out there, some sites fully intact. If you're like me, this information will lead you to wonder what the oldest available website actually is. I have no idea, but apparently the oldest registered dotcom domain name, dating back to 1985, belongs to computer company Symbolics. Judging by what's currently there, it hasn't been updated much. Unless the circle-square-triangle logo is the new look for Web 2.0. Bear in mind that the domain was registered even before the existence of the World Wide Web, which, by the way, was invented in 1989. You can even see a 1992 duplicate of the first Web site, here - check out the page about how to access it without the internet(!), and even the proposal for the World Wide Web. Think about that for a minute. It's quite a momentous thing to read and serves to remind us just how recent all this technology is. The web is constantly evolving, and that's something we've all come to accept. That's why websites are no longer strewn with that only slightly more contemporary cousin of clipart, the Under Construction signs of the mid-to-late-90s. Forget TV on demand, THAT's progress.
David Thair
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Read members' comments related to this column.
comment by Mister Savage
Jul 18, 2006
That was weird, looking at Collective like that. Not quite how I remember it, but doesn't it bring back the House of Frasier! It's also great to see how much the site has come along since then 
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related info
 useful linkswww.symbolics.com w3: world wide web under construction acme: construction
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