Wayback Machine

Wayback Machine

What is the Wayback Machine?

Wayback Machine is a part of the Internet Archive (IA) project set up in 1996. IA have been archiving the internet since then. That’s 26 years of web history across 735 billion web pages, all at your fingertips.

How is this useful to me?

Well, by using the WayBack Machine you can have a look at what any website looked like going back through time. Even look at your own website’s history to retrieve content including images. Perhaps you want to retrieve an old version of your company logo. It’s all there.

How do I use WayBack Machine?  Point your browser to https://archive.org/web/ and type in the URL of the website you want to look at backwards in time. Then choose the year followed by the date from a calendar and bingo.

Why is Internet Archive so cool?

IA don’t just archive websites, they are a non-profit organisation with an ever growing digital collection of cultural artefacts. They provide free access to researchers, historians, scholars, people with print disabilities, and the general public. Their mission is to provide Universal Access to All Knowledge. Cool.

They began in 1996 by archiving the Internet itself, a medium that was just beginning to grow in use. Like newspapers, the content published on the web was ephemeral – but unlike newspapers, no one was saving it. They also  work with 1,000+ library and other partners through our Archive-It program to identify important web pages.

As their archive grew, so did their commitment to providing digital versions of other published works. As of July 2023 their archive contains: