WayBack Machine
"I don’t have a photograph, but you can have my footprints. They’re upstairs in my socks." ~ Groucho Marx
An Unexpected Search¶
Several recent events have had me thinking more about open-source. The same as many people in the 1990s, my introduction to open-source was with Linux. I remember installing Slackware Linux and later switching to Red Hat Linux.
My wife would probably tell you I talked about Linux and open-source too much back then. I remember finding the topic exciting and wanting to learn more. Beyond that, what my specific thoughts were on the controversies of the day, I can't remember.
So I wanted to find a college paper I wrote on Linux on the WayBack Machine to compare with my current thoughts.
What I found surprised me.
Party Like It's 1999¶
Before I could use the WayBack Machine, I had to remember the home page for the site where I posted my paper. After much scrunching of my face, I finally remembered my personal site was on mama.instate.edu.
I didn't expect to find my paper there because I had requested my account be closed a few years after I graduated, but I wanted to see if it still existed.
Most of the links no longer work, but the site is still running and looks like it did in 1999!
Searching for Answers¶
Next, I headed over to the WayBack Machine to try to find my college paper. Sadly, my old site had only been captured after I took the paper down, but there was a search engine form on my site.
On a lark, I tried Yahoo just to see if it still worked. While I knew that the Internet Archive changes links to keep you within the WayBack machine, I didn't expect the search to work based on keywords.
For common terms, it's really cool that you can search Yahoo in the past with the WayBack Machine.
Try the link below to check this out. Just search for a term that is common (baseball, socks, puppies)