Time Travel by Computer: The 'Wayback Machine'

Sherman and Mr. Peabody, of the popular 1960s, children's television
cartoon series, "Rocky and Bullwinkle," enter the WABAC (pronounced
way-back) machine, which allowed them to travel back in time.
Today's "Wayback Machine" allows people to view old web pages
no longer available on the Internet. (Image Source: Wikipedia.org )

By Glenn A. Walsh
Reporting for SpaceWatchtower

With the Federal Government shutdown has also come the shutdown of most Government web sites, including the Internet web sites of NASA and other science-related agencies. However, some of the older Internet content of the web sites of these agencies may still be available, free-of-charge, through a unique Internet archive known as the "Wayback Machine."

The Wayback Machine is a digital archive of the World Wide Web and other information from the Internet, dating from 1996 to a few months ago. It is managed by the Internet Archive, a non-profit organization in San Francisco. Currently, there are about 240 billion pages archived.

Presently, it is necessary to know the actual Internet address of the web site or web pages of interest. Keyword-search is not available. However, in the case of shutdown Government web sites as well as other web searches of interest, a Google search can often give you the needed web address, or a web address close to the desired address for the web page of interest.

The Wayback Machine is named after the WABAC (pronounced way-back) machine, a time travel machine used by Mr. Peabody, a dog scientist with a bow-tie and eyeglasses, in the popular 1960s, children's television cartoon series Rocky and Bullwinkle.

More on the Wayback Machine:
Link >>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayback_Machine

Link to official site of the Wayback Machine, for searching past Internet web pages:

Link >>> http://archive.org/web/web.php

More on the WABAC machine in the cartoon series Rocky and Bullwinkle:
Link >>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WABAC_machine 

Source: Glenn A. Walsh Reporting for SpaceWatchtower, a project of Friends of the Zeiss.

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