What is Internet Archeology?

It's #2 and #3 :)

I've been trying to find time to put this together in a way that makes sense and people can help, but the shutdown drama has taken a toll and we've been busy working things out. The general idea is to use this as a place for exploring old sites like Time Travel Portal or Art Bell's old forums and "restoring" them. I have some tools behind the scenes to help with this, just haven't had time to do anything with it yet (like the TTI Museum).

Outside of that, this is a place to share cool finds from the Wayback Machine. There's a lot of interesting stuff out there that's been long forgotten. If you find an old post here with a dead link, try looking it up on Wayback and posting it here.

 
Hello Paula,

#2 & #3

If I may, I think the "fossils" on TTI can be excavated through a number of different tools; which the Wayback Machine is among the most useful. To be archived on the wayback machine is to take a snapshot in spacetime. As Cosmo mentioned, you can even revive dead links.

For #4 I believe Archaeology is the proper spelling, but we all know whatcha mean :)

-Oz

 
Searching a forum on Wayback is a pain is a lot of fun, but can bee a pain in the ass if you're after something specific. Older BBS software would include stuff like a session ID in the URL to keep track of what you've read. Those session IDs changed from visit to visit, so you'd have something like this:

domain.com/index.php?forumid=5&threadid=535&page=1&session=e4e9ewoijfmoiem84f8jm484mf84jf

Not a big deal until you try to visit page 2, but find that it was archived under a different session ID on another day. Unless you get lucky, it's not easy to get around very well this way.

That's a simplified example of the problem; different sites present different challenges. In the end, though, it's the same sort of problem. The early days of the internet had a lot of weird counter-intuitive stuff like this going on. I've had a lot of fun reading through Time Travel Portal and Anomalies forums, but ran into these issues all the time. I put together a tool takes care of that and makes it easy to find ALL the pages for a specific thread.

The basic idea is to give you guys an interface to help crowd-source cataloging things like Art Bell's old forum or anything else that we find interesting, and putting it back together. I had hoped to get some movement on that by now but everything has exploded so there's been no time. It's been 16 hour days at work getting ready for the job transition (I'm graduating from web developer to DevOps Engineer), but things will calm down eventually.

Soon!

If anyone here is savvy with command line stuff, there's a great tool out there that I've had a lot of fun experimenting with:

https://github.com/hartator/wayback-machine-downloader[/URL]https://github.com/hartator/wayback-machine-downloader

 


I might put together a tutorial on how to do different things with it if there's any interest.

 


The tool I built uses the same backbone, which is the Wayback CDX API

 


https://github.com/internetarchive/wayback/tree/master/wayback-cdx-serverhttps://github.com/internetarchive/wayback/tree/master/wayback-cdx-server

 


Long story short, this is a tool you can use to formulate a URL which will return a list of every page archived for a domain.You can even have it give you every page for every subdomain, or every page under a specific directory. Pretty easy stuff once you experiment with it a little, but you really need an interface to help organize and process the results. Otherwise you've just got a beast of a spreadsheet.That's what the tool I built does.

 

 

 
Last edited by a moderator:
Hello Paula,
#2 & #3

If I may, I think the "fossils" on TTI can be excavated through a number of different tools; which the Wayback Machine is among the most useful. To be archived on the wayback machine is to take a snapshot in spacetime. As Cosmo mentioned, you can even revive dead links.

For #4 I believe Archaeology is the proper spelling, but we all know whatcha mean :)

-Oz
Click to expand...
I am familiar with Wayback machine but I am still figuring out how to use it. There is an interesting site @JohnQAnonTitor and I discovered. We'll explain soon. My notes are scattered but he keeps much better notes than me.

 
@Cosmo1598825723 If and when you have time, I forgot how to use Wayback Machine and have a hard time pulling up the screen shots. When you are able to share your knowledge, we'd love it. Thanks.
Click to expand...
Sure. PM me the URL to the site you have in mind and I might be able to use it in the tutorial.

 
Back
Top