The Internet Archive, a nonprofit perhaps best known for its Wayback Machine web page archive service, is celebrating its 20th anniversary as reported by ZDNet.
Initially founded in 1996, the Internet Archive intends to build an "Internet Library." Its most prominent feature is perhaps the Wayback Machine, an index of over 273 billion saved web pages. However, the site features so much more than that. Among its other collections are a library of over ten million eBooks and texts, nearly three million individual videos, and over 150,000 individual pieces of software.
The nonprofit hasn't been resting on its laurels. As part of the celebration of its 20th anniversary, they've highlighted some of their other projects that they've been working on. For example, in 2013 they launched an effort to repair broken links in Wikipedia articles. Three years later, their efforts had replaced over a million broken links on the popular online encyclopedia. A similar automatic archival service has been operating on Wordpress blogs since 2013.
ZDNet's article linked to a video that features excerpts of a talk that go over some of the history of The Internet Archive. The talk features Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle talking about his history of the project as well as the service's aspirations to continue archiving digital content for another 20 years. Kahle received his Bachelor's Degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1982 and has spent much of his adult life working on technologies relating to the searching, indexing, and archiving of digital information.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGouMipNPoA
Of course, TechRaptor is one of the many web pages that have been crawled by The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine over the years. If you'd like to take a step into the past for a moment, consider taking a peek at an archive of our site from three years ago.
What do you think of the Internet Archive? What websites have disappeared that you wish were still around today? Have you found any interesting bits of nostalgia on The Wayback Machine? Let us know in the comments below!
