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Archive.org Celebrates Its 20th Anniversary (sfchronicle.com)

Posted by EditorDavid on from the wayback-wayback dept.

20 years ago this week, Archive.org started with just 500,000 sites. An anonymous reader quotes the San Francisco Chronicle: Now, the nonprofit San Francisco organization -- which celebrated the milestone with a party Wednesday night -- curates a vast digital archive that includes more than 370 million websites and 273 billion pages, many captured before they disappeared forever. It's more than an archive of Internet sites. The organization, founded by computer scientist and entrepreneur Brewster Kahle, now has a virtual storehouse ranging from digitally converted books and historic film to funny memes and audio recordings of Grateful Dead concerts...

The Internet Archive has survived through community donations and by working with about 1,000 libraries around the world that pay the group to help digitize books and other material. But the site itself remains free.
We've written about Archive.org over the years, and its collection of 2,400 DOS games, over 10,000 Amiga games (and other software) and a massive collection of arcade machine emulators. And here's what Slashdot looked like back in 1998. But what's your favorite page on Archive.org?

11 of 42 comments (clear)

  1. robots.txt by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    One thing I greatly dislike about archive.org is that they retroactively apply current robots.txt contents to archived versions of a site.

    I had a website that I sold years ago which now has a no crawl directive so the entire history is gone from the archive. Why would they remove archived versions which permitted crawling?

    1. Re:robots.txt by VicVegas · · Score: 2

      I cannot agree more. It is baffling to me that they would do such a thing.

  2. Gimp by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Saw the Slashdot screenshot's article on Gimp and realized that it still sucks as badly now as it did 18 years ago.

  3. i remember by Nick · · Score: 2

    i remember reading /. that day and those articles / headlines are still in my memory. feels weird.

    --
    Fuck Ajit Pai
  4. Didn't Work. by DMFNR · · Score: 3, Funny

    I tried to register on the 1998 Slashdot so I could get one of those nifty "low UIDs" that apparently denote a programmer of great skill and wisdom around here but it didn't work and I'm still a 12 year old cut and paste Python programmer.

    1. Re:Didn't Work. by Nick · · Score: 5, Funny

      time machine dude, it's what most of us did.

      --
      Fuck Ajit Pai
    2. Re:Didn't Work. by antdude · · Score: 2

      I use Apple's Time Machine. It doesn't work.

      --
      Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
    3. Re:Didn't Work. by WallyL · · Score: 2

      You were holding it wrong!

    4. Re:Didn't Work. by antdude · · Score: 2

      Steve Jobs, is that you? Aren't you dead? :P

      --
      Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
    5. Re:Didn't Work. by WallyL · · Score: 2

      Time machine, remember?

  5. Suspicious Treatment of Domain Drop Catching by Baldrson · · Score: 2

    Archive.org plays it dumb when archived content becomes unavailable due to a domain drop catcher placing a robots.txt archiving exclusion on the domain.

    This would not be quite so suspicious if it were not for the fact that when the original author of the material "memory holed" by archive.org pays the extortion to the domain drop catcher, archive.org and requests that archive.org restore the content for the public, archive.org will frequently (always?) fail to do sodo so.

    Archive.org's motive?

    What is Google's motive for making its Usenet archives virtually unusable?

    He who controls the past...

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    Seastead this.