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RR 2002/59 The Internet Archive Wayback Machine The Internet Archive San Francisco, CA 2001 http://web.archive.org Gratis Last visited November 2001 Keywords Internet, History
On October 24, 2001, the long-awaited Wayback Machine was unveiled at the Bancroft Library of the University of California-Berkeley Its creator/sponsor, the Internet Archive, is a registered US non-profit organization that was founded in 1996 to provide archival access to material available on the Internet. Its collections encompass Web pages, Usenet newsgroups, documents from Arpanet (the original Internet, a computer network created by the US Department of Defense in the mid-1970s), and other digital material. As all librarians are familiar with the difficulty in preserving electronic material for generations to come, surely this is a most worthy effort.
The Wayback Machine in particular contains over 10 billion Web pages, or over 100 terabytes of information, dating from 1996 to the present. If you cannot fathom exactly how much information is contained in 100 terabytes, it might put it in perspective to know that according to the online description (http://www archive.org/...