Wayback Machine Playback, now with Timestamps | Hacker News Reader

Wayback Machine Playback, now with Timestamps

blog.archive.org

134 pointssohkamyung7 comments

This is a shameless plug of my browser extension[1][2] for viewing archived and cached versions of web pages. Besides the Wayback Machine it also supports many other search engines, giving you a better chance of finding the data you're looking for. Please share any new archive or cache source you might know about.

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/view-page-arc...

[2] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/view-page-archive-...

The Internet Archive is such an essential feature for the Internet. I appreciate them stepping up their role as a repository of history for legal disputes, political debates, etc.

If the Wayback Machine or other archive.org projects have helped you, consider donating. https://archive.org/donate/

Just as a side-note about the Wayback Machine including video: I searched for a good copy of a certain music video a month ago; first tried YouTube, then Google Video, where I found this copy, to my surprise, on Archive.org:

Peter Schilling - "The Different Story (World Of Lust and Crime)" (1988)

https://archive.org/details/Peter_Schilling_Cretu_-_The_Diff...

Just found this too:

https://archive.org/details/musicvideobin

Another video better than any copy on YouTube:

https://archive.org/details/Ultravox_Vienna

About the archiving of TV news broadcasts:

> In 2013, the Archive received an additional donation of "approximately 40,000 well-organized tapes," from the estate of a Philadelphia woman

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Archive#TV_News_Searc...

I found the story of the woman[1] in question quite interesting. She was recording 24/7 news onto tapes across 8 machines throughout her house, and it seems like it took over her, and by proxy her husband's, life:

> Every six hours when the tapes would be ending, Stokes and her husband would run around the house to switch them out—even cutting short meals at restaurants to make it home to switch out tapes in time

I can't help but mention when talking about Archive.org - the Computer Magazine collection is one of my favourite places to get heavy nostalgia fix.[2]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marion_Stokes

[2]: https://archive.org/details/computermagazines

Really seems like IA/Wayback is rolling out nice front-facing features at a surprisingly fast pace, given how old (and stable) Wayback has been as a service. I'm sure Wayback's front-end features have changed a few times since 2001 (nevermind the backend), but I couldn't tell you what any of those changes might have been; Wayback has always seemed as straightforward as it is today.

(but just for reference's sake, here's a snapshot from Oct 2004 http://web.archive.org/web/20041019080216/http://www.archive...)

I hadn't heard of (or I've just forgotten) the term "Wayback Playback". It made me think that Wayback had an animated feature like "Shots" [0], which would be incredibly impressive.

I'm already super-impressed with the keyword-search they introduced last year. I've rarely used it because I've just gotten used to the idea of searching old pages to be an impractical information-bonanza. Now I wonder if eventually WB will manage to implement full-text search across its archives:

https://blog.archive.org/2016/10/24/beta-wayback-machine-now...

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11636311

> but just for reference's sake, here's a snapshot from Oct 2004

How meta! If obviously doesn't recurse, but it would have been neat if it had at least one extra layer of recursion. Because if there were any items that were uploaded and later removed due to legal issues, we could have accessed them through the archived archive.org! :D

For folks in the Bay Area, we'll be demoing some of our new features, products, and collections at our annual event this coming Wednesday in San Francisco: https://internetarchive20ctimemachine.eventbrite.com

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