The Evolution of the Web

As a kid, I used to watch the Rocky and Bullwinkle show. One segment of the show included a boy and his dog (or was it the other way around), named Mr. Peabody and Sherman, who used The Wayback Machine to travel back in time and learn about history.

There's a website - http://www.archive.org/web/web.php - called The Internet Archive Wayback Machine, that allows us to do the same thing - sort of.

Created by Internet search engine Alexa, The Internet Archive Wayback Machine enables you to explore an archive of 85 billion web pages from 1996 to a few months ago.

To try out the service, I typed in the URL for my college. To get as far back as I could, I used an older URL www.brookdale.cc.nj.us - which still points to the new URL www.brookdalecc.edu (circa 2002). The result below shows the archived copies of the webpage available from 1997 to late 2006.

It's interesting to look at the evolution of the web and webpages over time. Here is the oldest version available, from April 10, 1997. Amazing that this is almost exactly 10 years ago! Pretty much what you'd expect from that era - nothing fancy, dynamic or interactive.

The site was redesigned in 2002. Here is the result from June 1, 2002. Does it look familiar?

Could time really be standing still?