Serendipity35

You'll see people posting online sometimes about how hard it is to get rid of the questionable video they uploaded to YouTube, or those now-embarrassing pictures they posted to Facebook or Flickr. In other words, a lot of this stuff is archived. It has a life after you hit delete.

The Internet Archive site has a cool tool called The Wayback Machine that lets you enter a site's URL and it will check for archived copies of the site from year's past. A time machine for the web.

You'll hit a few dead links and some images may not load (because they were not archived - copyright issue?), but the links to other pages within that often do.

Take Google as an example. They are known for their really simple page design. Never changes, except for the logo on special days. Well, look at Google on November 11, 1998 and then in January 1999 it's Google Beta . Comparatively, the Beta looks busy!

I can just surf pages and look at things like what was happening on my birthday back in 2002 or what the web site at NJIT looked like in 1999. But, you can do more serious research too - look at the archived copy of CNN.com September 11, 2001 to see what was being reported that day as it happened. Compare the White House site in 1999 to the current site.

The main site at The Internet Archive also has lots of good stuff archived. The Moving Images Collection of movies, films, and videos has thousands of videos which range from "classic full-length movies, to daily alternative news broadcasts, to user-uploaded videos of every genre." It's public domain material, but there's great stuff from Reefer Madness, to Dragnet - Episode #18 "The Big Seventeen" including commercials from that time,

To justify you surfing the site while at school, look at the Open Educational Resources Archive collection of educational content including coursework, study guides, exercises, and recorded lectures great for students, teachers, and self-learners at all levels. There are lectures from MIT by Hal Abelson and Gerald Jay Sussman from the course "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs." Now really, who could fault you for watching Lecture 03a: The Henderson Escher Example? And I haven't even gotten to the text, audio and software files. All legal.

Did you get the image reference at the top of this entry? If you were a viewer of The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show back in the 1960's or on the compilation tapes/DVDs, you immediately spotted a still from "Peabody's Improbable History." That's a picture of dog genius Mister Peabody and his pet boy, Sherman. They used Peabody's WABAC machine (yeah, that's the inspiration for archive.org's "way-back" machine). They would go back in time to discover the "real" story behind historical events.