wayback

I was having fun with The Wayback Machine earlier tonight. The wayback machine is basically a massive archive of webpages as they were at the time, not just right now.

This leads to a number of very cool things:

1. you can read some reports I wrote at Uni that are still quoted in numerous papers and articles on the net. One such report is Groupware & Intranets-Driving efficiency and effectiveness in business. Another popular one was The Problems of Urban Sprawl in Victoria, and How to Solve Them. You can still find people referencing that article if you google for my name. (Note that the copies of the articles linked here were on a server called users.webtime.com.au, an ISP that I designed and implemented with Rusty for my then employer - the original articles were hosted on my uni account which has patchier wayback archiving.)
   
   Or how about this caustic article which was me pretending to be a newspaper writer for some uni assignment: The time & money wasting computer
   
   All this and more can be read on my super quality homepage - dated March 1996. The humour page has some still-funny stuff. (I seem to remember it was the big re-design. I'd hate to see the original version!! The earliest files in the wayback machine are dated 1996, but the server was having trouble when i tried to go there.)
2. (yes, the first one was a long expose of my writing talent ;) The other cool thing is a Wayback link. Drag that link to your browser's link bar, and click on it when you are viewing a page and want to see an old version. For instance, if you get nostalgic for the good old days of yahoo - go to www.yahoo.com, click the Wayback link, and you will find an early 1996 yahoo homepage linking to interesting news stories like "Lotus exec sees huge business-to-business Internet market" and "Gates says NT 5.0 to enter beta this fall". Did you know that in 1996 you could view the yahoo directory in 3D VRML?
   
   Or, for the Apple nuts, the 1996 homepage of www.apple.com tells us about Apple announcing a "new version of the GeoPort Telecom Adapter Kit, increasing modem speed to 28.8 Kbps" WOOHOO!!

Endless fun :)