Wayback Machine: Now with 240,000,000,000 URLs

Wayback Machine: Now with 240,000,000,000 URLs

Today we updated the Wayback Machine with much more data and some code improvements.  Now we cover from late 1996 to December 9, 2012 so you can surf the web as it was up until a month ago.  Also, we have gone from having 150,000,000,000 URLs to having 240,000,000,000 URLs, a total of about 5 petabytes of data.   (Want a humorous description of a petabyte?  start at 28:55)  This database is queried over 1,000 times a second by over 500,000 people a day helping make archive.org the 250th most popular website.

live 2012 election coverageOver the past year we archived tons of pages about the United States 2012 presidential election.  You can revisit theNew York Times live coverage page from election day, the campaign sites of Republican hopefuls like Newt Gingrich andRon Paul, and mini-scandals like Romney’s car elevator or using aspirin as contraceptives.  The Wayback record of the 2008 election was recently used by the Sunlight Foundation to contrast how Obama’s team dealt with disclosing inauguration donors then vs. now, so hopefully the 2012 election content will prove just as useful in the future.

city of heroes siteThe prolific volunteers of Archive Teamspent a lot of time this year archiving web sites on the verge of disappearing and then contributing those records to Internet Archive.  City of Heroes (including theboards with years of posts), Fortune Cityand Splinder were all saved from the proverbial wood chipper.

The updated version does have at least one known issue – there is a small amount of older content missing from the index, and it will take us another month or two to sort out that problem.  In the mean time, you can still visit the previous version of the Wayback with that content.

Game On 2.0

For those of you enrolling in Introduction to Game Programming this year stop playing Dwarf Fortress, and who isn’t, and get down to OMSI and see Game On 2.0!  Tell your parents it is educational, info from OMSI below:

Play your way through the past, present, and future of global gaming. From Pong to Gran Turismo, Game On 2.0 is a hands-on experience of video game history and culture, and includes over 125 playable games, including Mario All Stars, Wii Sports, Gran Turismo, Halo Reach, Pacman, Zelda and Sonic the Hedgehog.

Explore over 40 years of gaming entertainment; from the very first commercial coin-op game to the latest in virtual reality and 3D technology. Game On 2.0 celebrates game design, development, and production including original concept and character art and history’s most influential arcade consoles.

Challenge your parents to an old school game!

The First Great Computer Game -> Lunar Lander

Forty Years of Lunar Lander

In 1969, an Apollo-crazy high school student wrote one of the most influential computer games of all time.

Benj Edwards  of Technologizer has a nice summary of the history of Lunar Lander and the High School student who wrote one of the first computer games of all time.  It started so many of us using computers, able to replicate lunar landings, so soon after we all watched images of the first man to step on the moon.  I played this one for the first time in 1972 and it started me thinking, of imagining.  That was a big deal, everyone knew computers counted things, but beyond what was being done at the time with computers it was easy to see more, especially when I wasn’t constrained by understanding how it worked, yet.  I hope my students become as inspired.

20 years ago, the World Wide Web was born

20 years ago, the World Wide Web was born – SiliconValley.com

By Elise Ackerman

Mercury News
Posted: 03/12/2009 01:24:59 PM PDT

It all began 20 years ago today with a frustrated 29-year-old programmer who had a passion for order.

Tim Berners-Lee, now famous as the founder of the World Wide Web, was working as an obscure consultant at Cern, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, in the suburbs of Geneva. Berners-Lee loved the laboratory. It was full of stimulating projects and creative people, but his work, and the work of his colleagues, was stymied by the lack of institutional knowledge.

So Berners-Lee proposed adding “hypertext” to the Cern network, basically embedding software in documents that would point to other related documents. And thus was born the Web, a global communications network that has shaken up industries, created enormous wealth and transformed the way ordinary people live their lives.