The Boston Diaries

The ongoing saga of a programmer who doesn't live in Boston, nor does he even like Boston, but yet named his weblog/journal “The Boston Diaries.”

Go figure.

Thursday, October 25, 2001

Collapse of the Internet

I received the following in email today from my old college (where I still have an account):

From: XXXXXXXXXXXXXX <XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX>
To: sean@conman.org
Date: Wed, 24 Oct 2001 16:35:28 -0400
Subject: CSE-UGRADS: CSE Department Seminar- Friday 10/26
Precedence: bulk
Status: RO

A reminder that the next lecture in our Department Series is scheduled for this Friday, October 26th at 11AM in room 309.

Dr. Borko Furht will give a seminar on:
   “Internet Glory and Collapse”

All are welcome, refreshments will be served.

Isn't it nice to know that the Internet has already collapsed? Nothing to see, move along, get back to normal.

In other email, I got something from taliban@msn.com, but that's just regular spam for a porn related site. Figures.

“Set the Wayback machine to 1996, Sherm … ”

Oh my. I just came across the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, with an archive of the web going back to 1996. Okay, it may not be the entire web, but as they state:

You are about to use the world's largest database. With over 100 terabytes and 10 billion web pages archived from 1996 to the present, the Wayback Machine puts the history of the World Wide Web and the sum of all human knowledge at your fingertips. To start surfing the Wayback, type in the web address of a site where you would like to start, and press enter. Then select from the archived dates available.

I tried it on an old URL of mine:

http://pineal.math.fau.edu/~spc/

And yes, it did fine a link to that page, and unlike Google's cache, it includes the picture that was on the site at the time. Quite impressive.

I then decided to see if I could resurrect the site my old partner Chuck had, but the site kept giving me internal server errors. Hmmmm …

“I'm the boss … ”

Well, Spring was able to find Chuck's old page at the Internet Archive Wayback Machine. Cool, now you too can see what Chuck looks like.

“I'm the boss … ”

Well, Spring was able to find Chuck's old page at the Internet Archive Wayback Machine. Cool, now you too can see what Chuck looks like.

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