Wayback Machine

The Wayback Machine is a digital archive of the World Wide Web founded by the Internet Archive, a nonprofit based in San Francisco, California. Created in 1996 and launched to the public in 2001, it allows the user to go "back in time" to see how websites looked in the past. Its founders, Brewster Kahle and Bruce Gilliat, developed the Wayback Machine to provide "universal access to all knowledge" by preserving archived copies of defunct web pages. Launched on May 10, 1996, the Wayback Machine had saved more than 38.2 million web pages at the end of 2009. , the Wayback Machine has archived 833 billion web pages. The Wayback Machine began archiving cached web pages in 1996. One of the earliest known pages was archived on May 10, 1996, at 2:08p.m. (UTC). Internet Archive founders Brewster Kahle and Bruce Gilliat launched the Wayback Machine in San Francisco, California, in October 2001, primarily to address the problem of web content vanishing whenever it gets changed or when a website is shut down. The service enables users to see archived versions of web pages across time, which the archive calls a "three-dimensional index". Kahle and Gilliat created the machine hoping to archive the entire Internet and provide "universal access to all knowledge". The name "Wayback Machine" is a reference to a fictional time-traveling and translation device, the "Wayback Machine", used by the characters Mister Peabody and Sherman in the animated cartoon The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends. In one of the cartoon's segments, "Peabody's Improbable History", the characters used the machine to witness, participate in, and often alter famous events in history. From 1996 to 2001, the information was kept on digital tape, with Kahle occasionally allowing researchers and scientists to tap into the "clunky" database. When the archive reached its fifth anniversary in 2001, it was unveiled and opened to the public in a ceremony at the University of California, Berkeley. By the time the Wayback Machine launched, it already contained over 10 billion archived pages.