Internet Archive offers tools
to explore the past 

Yearning for the days of yesteryear or need to do historical research? You can visit a museum or library – or you can use your internet connection. 

There are many options on the internet for gathering information or simply taking a trip down memory lane. There are online databases, Facebook groups, newspaper archives, genealogy resources, and there’s also the Internet Archive. 

Archiving e-history

The Internet Archive is one of many non-profit organizations that maintains a digital library to keep a historical record of the internet itself. As such, you can find many old books or other materials online that you may not have access to physically. 

The archive database also includes audio, videos/films, and software from the past – such as old Atari games – for easy access in the future. It may seem like new information is always better in the modern day, but some knowledge is timeless, just like any library. 

One small part of the Internet Archive library offers a way to visit old websites called the Wayback Machine. This is an online internet archive that has stored old web pages from all different ages of the internet – almost like a time capsule!  

You can find what the Microsoft website looked like a long time ago or visit the old Amazon marketplace not long after it was founded. On top of this, you can better understand the development of internet culture first-hand, looking at older ages of the internet or even the trends that happened. 

Storing infinite data

With an estimated 402.74 million terabytes (TB) of information being added to the internet daily, it is difficult to know just how much the virtual world has changed. For reference, an average high-definition movie is about 4 gigabytes (GB), which would equate to more than 100 billion being added to the internet each day! 

Since 1996, the Internet Archive has been actively storing as much information as possible in a database that compresses files down into small text boxes that only create websites when the information is needed. This allows the Wayback Machine to “unbox” websites only when they are searched. 

Compressed files make large amounts of data easy to store. As of December 2020, Internet Archive holds more than 70 petabytes of information, equal to more than 18 million of those same high-definition movies in data. 

Visit web.archive.org and select from the menu option above to browse back in time!