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The Internet

Interview with Brewster Kahle 196

Posted by michael from the got-your-back-man dept.
Netmonger writes "A fascinating interview with the man behind The Wayback Machine. Some specs from the article: "It's 150-odd standard PC cases, with four drives in each.. 'Over 100 terabytes.. As plain text in book form, that'd be over 3000 miles of shelf space.." All I can say is.. Wow!"
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Interview with Brewster Kahle More

Interview with Brewster Kahle

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  • How many (Score:4, Funny)

    by FunkSoulBrother ( 140893 ) on Friday November 22, 2002 @03:03PM (#4733802)
    How many miles of shelf space equal one Library of Congress? Lets use standard units here people!

    • According to... (Score:4, Informative)

      by Cyclopedian ( 163375 ) on Friday November 22, 2002 @03:16PM (#4733932) Journal
      this [loc.gov], the LOC pales in comparision to "3000 miles of shelf space".

      -Cyc

    • How many miles of shelf space equal one Library of Congress? Lets use standard units here people!

      5.6603773584905660377358490566038 LOCs
    • I always have to chuckle when I see these analogies. "If you printed all of the data on a CD-ROM, it would reach Mars!"... that's super.

      There are at least two problems with such analogies:

      1) People use them to comment on the marvelous efficiency of technology - but in reality, it's only a comment on the hideous inefficiency of print. It doesn't say much at all about technology. It might be useful to convince people to digitize/OCR their printed matter - but is anyone *not* doing this? Even the Library of Congress is scanning its texts now.

      2) In this case it's a particularly bad analogy, because it assumes that all data is printed as hex. Example: images, which are obviously a huge, huge chunk of the Wayback archive. Virtually all website images are small enough to print on a printed page at full resolution. But consider a 500x500-pixel image, at 16 bits (2 bytes per pixel, 2 chars to represent each byte)... that's 1,000,000 characters, or 1,000 pages!

      Basically the analogy is good for wildly inflating some numbers to stun the 0.00001% of the population that doesn't already realize these things.

      - David Stein
    • According to this page [oreillynet.com], that's 5 LOC's (give or take).

    • Lets use standard units here people!

      YEAH! What is it in FPS?

    • I've always wondered how companies like this made money to keep going... surely it's expensive to keep all that going...

  • Wow! (Score:1)

    by Orkin ( 61749 )
    Does this thing still exist? I thought he had to kill it....
  • So why would you want to preserve all of it? Why not just get the good stuff and maybe he won't need so many comptuers. I understand that just choosing the good stuff would be very subjective, but do we really need archives of pr0n sites and popups?

    • Re:A lot of internet information is crap... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 22, 2002 @03:18PM (#4733957)
      We're not qualified to judge what "good stuff" is.

      For example, a ciouple of centuries ago old household accounts would have been considered valueless. But today's historians find a wealth of social data in them - what did people eat? how much did they get paid? did families tend to enter service together? how often did servants get new clothes?

      Disc space is cheap. Keep everything, let future historians sort it out.
      • 50 years from now when historians digs through 2002 e-mail logs, they'll probably think the most heavily consumed product in the country was (insert random spam product here).

        Ah, the legacies we'll leave... based on YOUR e-mail, what will YOU be remembered as?

      • Re:A lot of internet information is crap... (Score:4, Insightful)

        by garcia ( 6573 ) on Friday November 22, 2002 @03:39PM (#4734138)
        I think that storing everything on computers will make historians jobs MUCH less difficult but a lot less fun.
        Doing historical research is fun b/c you get to get your hands dirty (literally). I spent 6 hours a day for three weeks researching crime rates in Toledo, OH during prohibition (before, during, and after) and b/c the books were all handwritten and they were so old my hands turned black for days at a time...
        It would have been MUCH easier if all the information was sorted and easily found I guess it would make future historians jobs easier but what fun would that be?

        Just my worthless .02
        • I think that storing everything on computers will make historians jobs MUCH less difficult but a lot less fun.

          I think it's more that i will be different people. Understanding most of history is constrained by the lack of data about that time. Our age is precisely the opposite. We try and save EVERYTHING we can possible afford--because we know that crap will be valuable to many people later on. For next centuries historians it will be about data sampling and extracting the gold nuggets from all the crap we have saved.

          It will be the folks who built google. Not the current type of folks.

          That said. It's better to have too much than too little.
    • The whole point of the Internet Archive project is to document the growth of the Internet - in all its glory or lack of it thereof. There has never been an opportunity like this before. To be able to study the growth and maturity of a massive social phenomenon like the internet - something that affects the way humanity communicates on an elemental scale - is the dream of every social scientist.

      Picking and choosing what goes into the archive does not solve the purpose of the archive in any way.
    • A lot of internet information is crap... So why would you want to preserve all of it? Why not just get the good stuff and maybe he won't need so many comptuers.

      And of course, you're going to decide what is "good" and what "isn't?" He is providing the resource for, among other things, scholarly researchers. Of what use is the data if it has been hand edited according to one person's aesthetics or anothers?

      Indeed, your comment reminds me of one that was heard quite often, shortly before beautiful and irreplacable old buildings were razed to make way for a new strip mall, or, in downtown Chicago, a couple of new government buildings whose architectural style is best described as "Federal Drab." Preserving as much as possible is a good thing, because none of us can tell what will be valuable, and what will not, in another 20 or 30 years, and no one's aesthetic should be dictating such a decision to entire generations to come.
    • How dare you! The first web page I ever made was "crap"

      But I went to the wayback machine and checked it out. It was cool to see how far along i've come in my web design skills. Now I can show my friends the very first web site I ever made, and crap or not, it's there on the wayback machine and brings with it a lot of nostalgia. That's just the way sentimental crap goes, no matter how ugly or whatever, just the fact that you can go back and look at it makes it "cool"
    • Something you may think is crap may not be crap to someone else... I'm sure someone out there is interested in the millions of Britney Spears or *NStank picture galleries.
    • A lot of internet information is crap.

      One mans crap is anothers holy grail,
      what you think is interesting for another may be pale,
      For examply this limerick for you is shit,
      But I would be happy if it gets in the archive bit.

    • He brings up this point in the article. It's important to archive everything because we never know what's going to be usefull information in the future.
      In other words, perspective and context is a huge part in determining value and meaning. At some point these annoying popup ads may play be important for someone studying the evolution of advertising on the net. In fact, popups, or the frequency or timing of them might be something that's missing from the archive.
      Most of the culture is invisible to most of us most of the time. The things we take for granted are the most ingrained into us, and possibly the most interesting to someone after the culture has changed.

    • Re:A lot of internet information is crap... (Score:4, Funny)

      by 0xdeadbeef ( 28836 ) on Friday November 22, 2002 @03:25PM (#4734010) Homepage Journal
      You don't consider the archiving of pr0n a noble cause? Don't be so selfish, man, think of future generations!

      I mean, hell, forget pr0n, just imagine the blackmail value for the kids of 2020, to be able to dig up pictures of their parents on amihotornot.
    • Why not just get the good stuff and maybe he won't need so many comptuers.

      Identifying "good stuff" is very hard and certainly not something that can be automated. Furthermore, "good stuff" is in the eye of the beholder. Perhaps Jane's web page dedicated to her kittens in useless to almost everyone in the world. However, to Jane's great-great granddaughter who hasn't been born yet, it might provide a fascinating look into her own past. A historian a hundred years from now analyzing the first twenty years of the web would certainly want to know that porn and popups were so pervasive.

  • to get old pr0n! :D

  • Transient Moments (Score:5, Interesting)

    by szyzyg ( 7313 ) on Friday November 22, 2002 @03:05PM (#4733817)
    It's a shame that some fo the more interesting moments in Internet history are so transient the wayback machine can't catch them.

    e.g. The Ded Kitty picture we put up when napster shut down at the star of september, it was only there for a few hours but it will be lost.

    Of course, some of the more interesting transient events are websites that are hacked, but there exist dedicated archives for this kind of event, so you can relive the hilarity of RIAA.org being repeatedly defaced.

    • A very good point. I suppose transient and dynamic web pages aren't really as important to an archive of webpages... They're looking to save the RFCs and other important articles. Or so I suppose.
    • Perhaps we need to propose an extension to the robots.txt file to tell certain classes of search crawler to visit more frequently or at specific times?
    • This sounds great, but there are a lot of limitations. It's not just that the archive is transient (every 60 days), it's also static. Any web pages that access pay sites are not found. Any cool database links that you put into your Web Page and accessed through a cgi - I'm guessing that they are toast.

    • I wonder what all it catches. As someone else mentioned, dynamically created sites might not fair too well. There are obvious ways to make a crawler that will crawl many pages generated with CGI. Take a site like AintItCoolNews. Crappy website with everything done with CGI. However you could still write a crawler to crawl most of its links without any trouble. (I wrote one that did)

      I also wonder how well it does with Flash or other multimedia. I don't care about it not crawling commercial sites as much. There are much bigger copyright issues on that. Plus, lets be honest, most of those sites are just porn anyway. I don't think we need a historic archive of porn sites.

      My big question though is whether they backup their data regularly. Afterall even hard drives wear out. . .

  • stupid Joe Six-Pack metaphors (Score:4, Funny)

    by p_rotator ( 617988 ) on Friday November 22, 2002 @03:06PM (#4733840)

    As plain text in book form, that'd be over 3000 miles of shelf space.."

    Huh? How about "If all data was spoken at once, it would be as loud as 674 jet engines!" Or "If this archive were a planet, it would be as large as Jupiter!"

  • Wait wait (Score:2, Insightful)

    by PygmyTrojan ( 605138 )
    Now how many Library's Of Congress is that?

  • Move over Borges (Score:2, Interesting)

    by doogieh ( 37062 )
    As Borges once said about the Libaray of Babel [westnet.com] wayback now...

    The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite and perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries, with vast air shafts between, surrounded by very low railings.
    Looks like he wasn't too far off...

    ...The Library is a sphere whose exact center is any one of its hexagons and whose circumference is inaccessible.

    Well, maybe not...

  • Is this thing backed up? (Score:3, Funny)

    by TheSHAD0W ( 258774 ) on Friday November 22, 2002 @03:12PM (#4733894) Homepage
    I'd hate to see the history of the net destroyed if the sprinkler system goes off in their server room...

    • Re:Is this thing backed up? (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      read the article, it is backed up in two seperate locations, as well as all their old disks.

  • Kahle? (Score:3, Funny)

    by Prince_Ali ( 614163 ) on Friday November 22, 2002 @03:14PM (#4733917) Journal
    Who is this Kahle guy? I know for a fact that it is Mr. Peabody who is behind the way-back machine. I was with him when he visited Nobel.

  • On a related note, look up the Long Now Foundation (Score:3, Interesting)

    by JJAnon ( 180699 ) on Friday November 22, 2002 @03:15PM (#4733929)
    Here [longnow.org]. They seek to create physical items (clocks and libraries are two items they name) that will last for very, very long periods of time. This [longnow.org] diagram shows what is meant by the "long now", and this [sciencemuseum.org.uk] is a link to their first prototype clock that is on display in the Science Museum in the UK (the second clock on the page).

  • 100 Terabytes! (Score:3, Informative)

    by insanecarbonbasedlif ( 623558 ) <insanecarbonbase ... nOSPam.gmail.com> on Friday November 22, 2002 @03:16PM (#4733931) Homepage Journal
    I did a quick price [pricewatch.com] check and for 100 terabytes of data on 80GB drives (Best price/size ratio I could find), that's about $111,250 worth of storage. Of course, I guess they would get bulk discounts :).

    • Re:100 Terabytes! (Score:3, Informative)

      by dougmc ( 70836 )
      The math (100 terabytes, 150 computers, 4 drives per computer) works out to an average of 171 GB/drive. Of course, they said `over 100 TB' so it's actually higher than that.

      Obviously they're using IDE drives. Modern ones. And they must have replaced almost everything at once -- there could a mixture of 200 GB and 120 GB drives, but it would have to be mostly 200 GB drives.

      Pretty neat, but still doesn't hold a candle to google's massive setup :)

      (google must have a *team* of people who's sole job is finding failed computers/drives and replacing them :)

      • Lets hope they arn't using those IBM disks [slashdot.org]
      • over 100 TB

        Wait, do they mean 100 trillion bytes, or 100 * 2**40 bytes? That's how these sneaky hard drive manufacturers get you!

      • Actually, google uses some kind of flash memory to store all their data; the initial cost is much more, but the savings of not having to replace drives constantly pays off in the end.. this was brought up in an intervew a while back (sorry, can't find URL). And seeing as how their entire archive is refreshed every few days, it's not all that important that the data storage be reliable after a power failure or whatever.
    • They use 160 GB drives btw. And they claim 200 GB drives should be comming out any day now.

      Plus they have 3 separate facilities, I'm assuming each is a "complete set".

      I personally have two 120 GB drives which is way more than I need, but hey, I got a deal on em, so I bought two so one could be a backup (put it in a seperate machine, albeit at the same location) rsync is a wonderful tool. :) I'm a digital pack rat as well, what can I say?

    • For comparison I did a quick price [walmart.com] check and for 3000 miles of shelf space on 5x26.25" bookcases (best price/size ratio I could find), that's about $29M worth of bookcases. Using harddisk drives was a smart decision.

  • Obligatory (Score:1, Offtopic)

    by Pastor Fluff ( 555255 )
    ...Beowulf Cluster reference.

  • I don't understand terabytes.... (Score:4, Funny)

    by nebenfun ( 530284 ) on Friday November 22, 2002 @03:16PM (#4733938)
    "Over 100 terabytes.. As plain text in book form, that'd be over 3000 miles of shelf space.."

    I don't understand terabyte or the shelf space analogy...
    I need to know how many banana's.

    nbfn
    • I believe the actual standard for this is supposed to be the number of Libaries of Congress that would fit.

    • Re:I don't understand terabytes.... (Score:4, Funny)

      by gid ( 5195 ) on Friday November 22, 2002 @03:53PM (#4734242) Homepage
      Well since bananas can't directly hold data that well since they rot so quickly, well have to use those bananas to store data by some other indirect means.

      So, how many bananas would it take to feed all the monkeys needed to store the data? Monkey's aren't that smart so lets approximate each monkey can hold 4k worth of data.

      100 TB = 100 * 1024 * 1024 * 1024 KB = 107374182400 KB

      107374182400 KB / 4 = 26843545600 monkeys

      Now we'd want redundancy so lets have triplictate monkeys for all our data, in case one dies, or runs away, or simply forgets.

      26843545600 * 3 = 80530636800 monkeys

      But now want want to figure out how many bannas they're gonna eat, lets say 5 bananas a day per monkey?

      80530636800 * 5 = 402653184000 bananas to feel all monkeys per day

      402653184000 * 365 = 146968412160000 bananas to feed all monkeys per year

      146,968,412,160,000 or 146 trillion bananas per year, which is probably just slightly over the nation debt.

      Overall, I think your method of using bananas to store all this data is quite ridiculous. The latency and dataloss would be unbearable. Plus think of all the poop these monkeys would create, and you'd NEVER be able to get PETA off your back.
      • ...lets have triplictate monkeys for all our data, in case one dies, or runs away, or simply forgets...

        Authough they have a much larger footprint than monkeys, I'm told Elephants have better data retention characteristics and the peanut has a much smaller form factor than the banana.

  • Wayback technology (Score:5, Informative)

    by watchful.babbler ( 621535 ) on Friday November 22, 2002 @03:18PM (#4733954) Homepage Journal
    There's an excellent interview with Kahle on technical details at O'Reilly's own archive -- here [oreillynet.com].

  • Sounds good... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by C0LDFusion ( 541865 )
    ...except for the fact that he allowed the Church of Scientology to bend him over and use him like a toy. Why doesn't he get some Google backbone and refuse to bow to their DMCA threats?

    Oh, I forget that honor is dead on the internet.
    • First of all Brewster doesn't have the resouces to deal with the "Church" of Scientology. If you want to put up your money to defend against them feel free, but don't go and tell the Archive what to do. Secondly most of this stuff still exists at the Bibliotheca Alexandria's copy of the wayback machine. Check out http://archive.bibalex.org, and that is unlikely to change, Brewster was smart enough to send copies to places with different copyrights.

      • A site I run (sniggle.net [sniggle.net] - formerly found at syntac.net [syntac.net]) was removed from the wayback machine when the church of Scientology complained about an image of L. Ron Hubbard on one of the site's pages.

        Now, not only all of the pages on my site, but all of the pages at syntac.net have vanished from the wayback machine.

        Oh yeah, and they can't be found at Bibliotheca Alexandria either, so that's no solution.

        Brewster's going to have to turn down his rhetoric about the wayback machine a bit until he gets the resources to fight back. Otherwise people might get the impression that he really is keeping the history of the web, even the parts of the web that entities like the church of Scientology don't like, alive.

  • Silly Me! (Score:3, Funny)

    by Cap'n Canuck ( 622106 ) on Friday November 22, 2002 @03:23PM (#4733991)
    And here I thought it was Mr. Peabody that invented the Wayback Machine. No, hang on, it was Al Gore...

    But seriously, unless you know about this project, and the fact that you can ask to remove data from the archives (though there's no reference as to how to actually do it), it means that your Internet past can haunt you forever.

    Or at least until simultaneous attacks occur on Cairo and San Francisco...
    • I just realized - if terrorists blow up Cairo and the Bay area, I'm going to be the first one on the suspect list!

      Damn! Now I'm really interested in how to remove stuff from their archive!

  • Another site, with pics (Score:5, Informative)

    by RhBaby ( 224440 ) on Friday November 22, 2002 @03:25PM (#4734011) Homepage
    http://www.mindjack.com/feature/archive.html

    In the interest of full disclosure, I wrote it, so be gentle.

  • Picture of a Picture (Score:4, Funny)

    by paughsw ( 620959 ) on Friday November 22, 2002 @03:29PM (#4734059)
    I put in www.archive.org into the wayback machine and my computer exploded!
    • Oh Contraire

      The first *working* link from http://archive.org
      October 11th 1997 [archive.org]

      Notice how it says The Archive will provide historians, researchers, scholars, and others access to this vast collection of data (reaching ten terabytes), and ensure the longevity of this information.

      Oh how the times have changed.
      BTW: Considering the importance of the archive, be gentle! Slashdoting archive.org == bad!

  • See also (Score:4, Informative)

    by danlyke ( 149938 ) on Friday November 22, 2002 @03:29PM (#4734061) Homepage
    For other Brewster Kahle interviews, see also the Slashdot story [slashdot.org] that pointed to the O'Reilly interview [oreillynet.com] and the Slashdot story [slashdot.org] that pointed to the Feed magazine interview [feedmag.com] (which is currently unaccessible from my machine).

  • Odd, no copyright questions (Score:5, Insightful)

    by dsanfte ( 443781 ) on Friday November 22, 2002 @03:34PM (#4734102) Journal
    I was curious to how the Wayback Machine's operators view its legal status... I mean, it's not really a search engine in the broadly accepted meaning of the term. It doesn't just search what's out there, it archives entire pages of old information; And while search engine sites do this (google), this is ALL the wayback machine site does.

    Surely they must know they're treading on untested legal ground. All it might take is one offended copyright holder to bring the whole thing to its knees. Basing it in a country other than the USA might have been smarter, then, given the existence of laws like the DMCA which could serve to shut the site down.
    • In presentations, Brewster says his policy is to take out the complainers. So if you think having your site in the Wayback Machine is a copyright infringement, he'll just take it out. Meanwhile he's taking the Napster approach: assume what you're doing is legal until someone tells you to stop. Hopefully that day won't arrive.
    • Copyright Policy
      10 March 2001

      The Internet Archive respects the intellectual property rights and other proprietary rights of others. The Internet Archive may, in appropriate circumstances and at its discretion, remove certain content or disable access to content that appears to infringe the copyright or other intellectual property rights of others. If you believe that your copyright has been violated by material available through the Internet Archive, please provide the Internet Archive Copyright Agent with the following information:

      Identification of the copyrighted work that you claim has been infringed;
      An exact description of where the material about which you complain is located within the Internet Archive collections;
      Your address, telephone number, and email address;
      A statement by you that you have a good-faith belief that the disputed use is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law;
      A statement by you, made under penalty of perjury, that the above information in your notice is accurate and that you are the owner of the copyright interest involved or are authorized to act on behalf of that owner; and
      Your electronic or physical signature.

  • True story and a small thanks.... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 22, 2002 @03:38PM (#4734131)
    Small personal thanks from me. I had put an online exhibit of my artwork up a few years ago, but unfortunately lost all of it by a harddrive failure. Much to my surprise I was able to find nearly all of my site, http://www.gpapassavas.com [gpapassavas.com] online and backed up on the WBM.

  • Why only four? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by pla ( 258480 ) on Friday November 22, 2002 @03:41PM (#4734158) Journal
    Out of curiosity, why only four drives per PC?

    With a simple $10 PCI IDE card (per additional 4), you could have gotten at *least* 8 drives, possibly as many as 16, per case. Granted, not many cases will let you *mount* that many, but I would expect paying a few bucks extra for the IDE cards and a better case would save quite a bit of money (and physical space) by halving or quartering the number of PCs you need ($100 extra to save $1500 per $2000, not counting the drives themselves?).

    88lf of machines vs 22lf. One requires an entire room, one would fit on a standard sized 3-or-4-tier storage rack. Of course, speaking of racks (of a different sort)... What on earth made you go with an array of standard PCs rather than a raid-in-a-rack?
    • I'd assume they'd be SCSI cases, in which case, he should be able to get at least 16. SCSI stops being hyper-expensive in quantity.

    • Re:Why only four? (Score:5, Informative)

      by jandrese ( 485 ) <kensama@vt.edu> on Friday November 22, 2002 @03:56PM (#4734260) Homepage Journal
      Probably the limiting factor there is the PCI bus. Modern ATA HDDs tend to saturate vanilla PCI busses (which is why most chipsets have custom busses between the north and southbridge these days). Add ATA cards and your PCI bus quickly becomes saturated and not very good for serving webpages. Worse, since the NIC probably sits on the PCI bus as well, you can easily starve your NIC with too many ATA devices on PCI ATA controllers.

      I know, I have a fileserver at home that has this exact problem, but I don't care if my fileserver is slow so it's not a problem.
    • Wouldn't it make more economic and performance sense to cut the number of PCs by a third and take the $50k and invest in a more high-performance and space-conservative disk subsystem?

      Something like this [ebay.com].

      Would give you far better disk performance and scalability than trying to add another 200 PCs with IDE disks.

    • Archive architecture (Score:3, Informative)

      by yppiz ( 574466 )
      I worked on some projects with the Internet Archive from 1998 - 2000.

      The Archive's first storage device (circa 1996) was a large StorageTek tape robot with a multi-gigabyte disk cache to handle user requests for archived pages. As drives and processors became cheaper, it became more interesting to use them instead of tape. The cost penalty of using drives over tape is only 2x - 3x, with the enormous win of increased bandwidth and decreased latency (when the request queue for the bot got large, the wait time for a page could be 16 hours. With disk, it's a fraction of a second).

      The first hard-drive based Archive storage used multiple 4U and 5U 12-20 drive Linux/FreeBSD boxes with ~80G IDE drives and Promise cards.

      Drive density is greater now - you can get 200G IDE drives and 320G IDEs are on the way, so you can use regular PCs as opposed to custom or niche-market (rackable server) boxes.

      --Pat / zippy@cs.brandeis.edu
  • It's OK, but what's so fascinating about it? Honestly, I don't get it. I get the archive's idea - I use it myself. I just don't understand what was so 'fascinating' about the interview...
  • ...Who's going to archive the archive?
  • I knew I'd read this Slashdot story before!

    http://web.archive.org/web/19971221012817/http://s lashdot.org/ [archive.org]

  • Vaguely uncomfortable (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I understand what the Internet Archive is meant to do, and in alot of ways I admire Brewster Kahle. But...they are archiving and republishing millions of pages that were never intended to last forever. And without permission at that. I don't mean this from a legal perspective, as I have no idea what the laws are on this, but something seems at least slightly wrong about that.

    If there is a way to permanantly erase pages from the archive, I would be a little less worried. But I can never tell if they let you delete stuff, or just "block" it. "Blocking" is crap, we all know what that will be worth if somebody really wants the info someday and knows the Archive has it.

    • Re:Vaguely uncomfortable (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Maul ( 83993 )
      I disagree completely.

      If you put something on the web, you have put it up for the world to see. The whole point of putting information on the web is making that information available to lots of people.

      What the Internet Archive is doing is no different than libraries storing old copies of newspapers and magazines. With an increasing amount of things being published online, we need an archive of those things.

      Years from now archives of web pages will be quite useful for those doing research on the events of today.

      Say you are a student in the year 2050 and are doing a report on the "history of the web." Wouldn't it be nice to have copies of the web pages from the 1990s to show how the "early" web looked like?
  • ...whenever faced with interesting PC configurations (such as the "150-odd PCs with 4 drives in each")...

    "Yeah, but can it make coffee?"

    Response being:

    Of course it can! But since it's the Wayback Machine, it's yesterday's coffee... old, cold, and slightly burnt (but when you gotta, you gotta)...

  • Inspite of the fact they seem to get a good amount of funding for this project, it seems the equipment they can afford cannot nicely handle many, if not most, of the page requests. I tried to access a website on a date I know for certain it was up, and their proxy server timed out.

  • Vannevar Bush (Score:3, Informative)

    by Mannerism ( 188292 ) <keith-slashdotNO@SPAMspotsoftware.com> on Friday November 22, 2002 @04:26PM (#4734498)
    Technologists have promised the digital library for decades. In 1945, Vannevar Bush, who was technology adviser to several US presidents, wrote an article in The Atlantic magazine outlining how computers might one day augment libraries.

    Those who find this subject interesting, but who may not be familiar with Vannevar Bush's work, might want to read the paper to which Brewster Kahle refers [theatlantic.com].
  • Really? And where is Mr. Ward [toonopedia.com] these days?

  • The Wayback machine is a lie (Score:5, Insightful)

    by corebreech ( 469871 ) on Friday November 22, 2002 @05:00PM (#4734743) Journal
    Try accessing news stories immediately prior to and after the September 11 attack and you'll see just how valuable this website is... or rather, isn't.

    I have also personally ran a website which contained fairly controversial material (based on this story [projectcensored.org]) that I saw listed on their website and then removed shortly thereafter. Tell me, why would a service like this ever have occasion to remove material once it's been archived, especially if there are *NO* copyright issues and the webmaster of the archived site never asked them to remove it?

    The answer is simple: the powers-that-be saw how dangerous it was to make all this information available to anyone on demand so they took control. It would be a great service were it allowed to operate unfettered, but the reality is quite different.

    And I'm the first to mention this here so far? You should all be modded down -1 for naiveté.
    • I have also personally ran a website which contained fairly controversial material (based on this story [projectcensored.org]) that I saw listed on their website and then removed shortly thereafter. ...

      And I'm the first to mention this here so far? You should all be modded down -1 for naiveté.

      Hm. And yet the WayBack Machine has the Project Censored page here [archive.org], and even the AlterNet story [archive.org] linked therein. Ah, but yes, it must be a conspiracy by the Big Eye In The Pyramid -- someone call Hagbard Celine [rawilson.com]. Fnord.

      -1, Delusional.

  • Any bets.... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by MDX-F1 ( 87940 ) on Friday November 22, 2002 @05:15PM (#4734901)
    on how long before a politician has to resign because of some over the top statements he/she made in a flamewar back in college? Or maybe that webpage of ethnic jokes that seemed so hilarious back in high school.

    I have a feeling we are either going to have to become way more forgiving, or we're going to be stuck with only faceless boring types with no opinions as our leaders (no wisecracks, it could be much worse than it is now).
  • http://web.archive.org/web/19971221012817/http://s lashdot.org/ [archive.org]

    With quality website snapshots like this, I can see how it will be a great resource for future historians!
  • Well, it seems as if the wayback machine has indeed created a paradox. A simple lookup of 127.0.0.1 gives some fairly interesting results. [archive.org]

    The most interesting of these is the one from October 19th 2000. [archive.org] See for yourself!

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