Summary
Have you ever wanted to go back and see how a website looked years ago? Fortunately, the Internet Archive has been saving historical versions of websites for years. Here’s how you can use the Wayback Machine to see what a website looked like years ago.
Listen
Links
Transcript
Have you ever wanted to go back in time? Obviously, time travel is still a long way away, if it’s even possible at all. However, if you want to see what a website looked like in the past, there is a way to see it, courtesy of the Internet Archive.
For Personal Tech Media, this is Two Minute Tech. I’m Jim Herman.
The Internet Archive was founded in 1996 with the goal of providing free access to digital content. It uses web crawlers to save copies of websites. The Wayback Machine allows you to enter a web address and see how that page looked throughout history.
However, the Internet Archive is more than just an archive of websites. It also has a wide variety of other digital content that’s available for you to browse. The Archive holds a collection of movies and television shows that are available for free.
The Archive also has a collection of 36 million books, 2 million music recordings, 15 million spoken audio recordings, 4.5 million images, and almost 1 million software programs and games. All of this content is available for free, thanks to the Internet Archive.
And in case you’re wondering, all of the content contained on the Internet Archive is legal. Much of the content is licensed under Creative Commons, or it has already entered the public domain. While there are occasionally legal challenges to the Archive’s ability to provide content, as a user, you would not be impacted or at legal risk.