A small group in Berkeley California began archiving web sites in 1996. Just as search engines do, they sent software robots across the Internet to crawl every web site they could find. The web pages were then archived, with the data stored in an ever-expanding number of PCs. These machines now contain the web as it was over the years … wayback.

Today, the Wayback Machine is composed of over two hundred PCs in the basement of a former military building at the Presidio in San Francisco. Each stores about 300 gigabytes of data. “The Wayback Machine currently contains over 100 terabytes of data and is growing at a rate of 12 terabytes per month, is the largest known database in the world, containing multiple copies of the entire publicly available web. This eclipses the amount of data contained in the world's largest libraries, including the Library of Congress.”

To get a perspective of the enormity of the database, the web collection contains over 10 billion web pages taking 100 terabytes of disk storage. A terabyte is a trillion bytes. The Library of Congress has 20 million books and would take only 20 terabytes to store them all in a database.

I had read that the Wayback Machine could be addicting. It is. Take a look at your favorite newspaper, The Earth Times on the Wayback Machine. There you can read the November 25, 1996 edition or about a hundred other issues since then. Yahoo also looked a little different a few years ago as well. Use the Wayback Machine and find those sites you once enjoyed and are now kaput. It may stir up a memory or two.

Using the Wayback Machine is very simple. You key in the URL of the desired site and, if it is in the database, a page is displayed showing the month and year of each archived version. Click and you are carried Wayback. Be warned, you are bound to come up against a major fault of the site. It is so popular that you have to wait your turn for service.