What do Rocky and Bullwinkle have to do you with your website? People
of a certain age will remember the cartoon The Rocky and Bullwinkle
Show. (“Hey Rocky – Watch me pull a rabbit out of a hat!”)
Mr Peabody and Sherman in that cartoon series had a time-travelling
device known as the WABAC machine, and they travelled through history to
see and change events.
This cartoon left such an impression on Brewster Kahle and Bruce
Gilliat (early internet pioneers), that when they saw websites
disappearing in a virtual puff of smoke when they were deleted in the
early days of the internet, they decided to create an internet time
travelling machine.
This machine is the Wayback Machine and travels the internet taking
snapshots of the code of websites as they are at a particular moment.
It is run by a not-for-profit organisation and creates is a free
digital archive of sites on the web.
People can then view these archives to see the history of the internet as it was and to observe changes through time.
While the Wayback Machine started only as a way to snapshot
“important” sites and events, it rapidly expanded to cover any
high-traffic sites.
However, you don’t have to wait for their bots to find you (or to
become internet popular and get a lot of traffic to your site).
You can also ask the Wayback Machine to take a snapshot of your small business website as at a particular moment in time.
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