The Wayback Machine

wayback

The Wayback Machine (part of https://web.archive.org) has been making backups of the World Wide Web since 1996. Mark Graham, its director, describes it as "a time machine for the web." It does that by scanning hundreds of millions of webpages every day and storing them on their servers. To date, there are nearly 900 billion web pages backed up. Computer scientist Brewster Kahle says "The average life of a webpage is a hundred days before it's changed or deleted."

The first time I heard the name "Wayback Machine" I immediately thought of the fictional time-traveling device used by Mister Peabody (a dog) and Sherman (a boy) in the animated cartoon The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends. In one of the show's segments, "Peabody's Improbable History", the characters used the machine to witness, participate in, and often alter famous historical events.

Sherman and Peabody

Sherman and Peabody

It has been many years since I watched these cartoons, but I recall them as funny and educational. I might be wrong about the latter observation.

I visited the website today and searched this blog's URL https://www.serendipity35.net and found that our site has been saved 153 times between February 8, 2009, and May 3, 2024. However, this blog started in February 2006, but that was when it was a little project in blogging I started with Tim Kellers when we were working at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. At that time it was hosted on NJIT's servers, so our URL was http://dl1.njit.edu/serendipity, for which there is no record. Perhaps, the university did not allows the Wayback Machine to crawl our servers.

serendipity35 2009

According to Wikipedi's entry, The Wayback Machine's software has been developed to "crawl" the Web and download all publicly accessible information and data files on webpages, the Gopher hierarchy, the Netnews (Usenet) bulletin board system, and downloadable software. The information collected by these "crawlers" does not include all the information available on the Internet, since much of the data is restricted by the publisher or stored in databases that are not accessible. To overcome inconsistencies in partially cached websites, Archive-It.org was developed in 2005 by the Internet Archive as a means of allowing institutions and content creators to voluntarily harvest and preserve collections of digital content, and create digital archives.

Crawls are contributed from various sources, some imported from third parties and others generated internally by the Archive. For example, crawls are contributed by the Sloan Foundation and Alexa, crawls run by Internet Archive on behalf of NARA and the Internet Memory Foundation, that mirror Common Crawl

screenshot 2014

A screenshot from the blog from a decade ago (2014).

Searching on another website of mine - Poets Online - I find pages from 2003 when it was hosted on the free hosting platform Geocities. There are broken lonks and missing images but they give a taste of what the site was back then in the days before customizable CSS and templated websites. They have archived a page from March of this year and most of the links and some images come through.

The online Wayback Machine is not the one that sparked by time-traveling imagination as a child. Yes, I wanted to accompany Sherman and Mr. Peabody, but I will have to be content to the time travel of looking at things from my past on and offline.

Waybackmachine3.png
Screen shot from DVD of Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons., Fair use, Link

1970s Computer Clubs

Apple I

                 The Apple 1 as displayed at the Computer History Museum

On March 5, 1975, the Homebrew Computer Club first met in a garage near Menlo Park in Silicon Valley, California.

On that day, I was across the country in my last semester at Rutgers. I had taken one course in computer programming, using Fortran, which had been around in some earlier forms since the late 1950s. We used a box of punch cards to create a program. I had looked into the class as an auditor, for no credit and not on my transcript, because I had talked to the professor after an information session he gave, and he was curious to see what an English major would do in his class.

My afterschool and vacation job in high school was doing printing for a liquor distributor. They had a room with huge computers using tape drives and cards, and I would sometimes wander in there and talk to the operator. Of course, I understood nothing about what he was doing. He was in a unique place in that position because no one in the company understood what he was doing except him and his one assistant. And yet those computers, printed all the invoices which I would later have to box up and file in the warehouse. Though they were using the computer to print them all, no one could access that data from their desktop, so if someone wanted a copy of an invoice, they had to dig through a file cabinet.

That 1970 computer was certainly not for personal use, and no one had a personal computer because they did not exist. Most of my fellow students didn't imagine we would ever have a computer in our home. They were gigantic — a computer easily took up an entire room. And they were very, very expensive, costing about a million dollars each. Not even computer engineers or programmers who made a living working on computers had access to a personal computer.

So this California club served a real need for tech-minded people But many of these tech-minded people wanted to build personal computers for fun. And they decided to start a hobbyist club to trade circuit boards and information and share their enthusiasm. Among the early members were high school friends Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. Eventually, they would design and build what tey called the Apple I and II computers and brought them to the club to show them off. Lee Felsentein and Adam Osborne were also members and would create the first mass-produced portable computer, the Osborne 1.

Wozniak would write "The theme of the club was 'Give to help others.' Each session began with a 'mapping period,' when people would get up one-by-one and speak about some item of interest, or a rumor, and have a discussion. Somebody would say, 'I've got a new part,' or somebody else would say he had some new data or ask if anybody had a certain kind of teletype."

I started teaching in a junior high school, in the fall of 1975, and shortly thereafter, the school got a terminal that was connected to a mainframe at some university in New Jersey. It was first used by one of the math teachers for a kind of computer club. I did go to his classroom a few times just to see how it worked but I saw no connection to what I had learned about programming in college.

It would be a few years before the first personal computers appeared in the school   We had a lab that was used for the first actual computer class. It was a classroom full of standalone TRS 80s. TRS stands for Tandy RadioShack, though later they were nicknamed Trash 80s. I took a professional development class using those computers where we learned to program in BASIC. I created a vocabulary flashcard program that I was able to use with a few of my English classes during periods when the lab was not being used by the math teacher. The program was crude. The graphics were basically nonexistent, but the kids and I found it very interesting. 

I remember one teacher who was in the professional development class, saying we will all have to learn to program in the future. I was sure she was wrong. I had no doubt that computers would play a role in our teaching future, but I was also sure that other people would be writing the programs and we would only be users.

apple iie

The first computer I had in my classroom was an Apple IIe. Since I had some computer background and more so because I had some interest in learning more, I became the computer coordinator for the building. That meant my computer had two disc drives so that I could copy software that we had purchased and were allowed to copy.  MECC was a big source of classroom software back then.

The first computer I bought for home use was the same as what I had in my classroom which made sense because then I could use the software home too. This hardware was expensive. I paid more for the Apple dot matrix printer than I paid for my laptop last year.

We remained an aApple school, and an apple family for a few years until a new person moved into the position of district computer coordinator. He swapped out all the Apple computers for what we would call IBM clones, but we're the early Windows95-equipped computers. When I bought my next computer, it was one using Windows 95.

When I left teaching secondary school in 2000 and went to work at NJIT, all the computers used Windows except for the school of architecture, which was an Apple Mac building. They were their own little tech world. And so I lost contact with the Apple world in those days when even TV commercials and print ads would argue about whether you were a Windows or Mac kind of person. I remember one professor saying to me that he was surprised I was not using a Mac because I seemed like "a creative type."

No More Cached Wepages from Google

cache
Google Cache - Author: Seobility - License: CC BY-SA 4.0

It seems too soon to do another Google Graveyard post but the company has killed (they say "retired') something else. This time it's not a product but a feature. The cached webpages are dead.

Google Search will no longer make site backups while crawling the web and so they will no longer be keeping a backup of the entire Internet. The cache has been an alternative way to load a website that was down or had changed.

Cached pages were not rendered exactly like how you would expect. In 2020, Google switched to mobile-by-default, so when you visited a cached link, you got the mobile site.

An X post from Google said that the feature "was meant for helping people access pages when way back, you often couldn't depend on a page loading. These days, things have greatly improved. So, it was decided to retire it."

Valentine's Day with Artificial Intelligence

valentine card kids
When love was easy. Or at least easier.

Since my dating days were before dating became an online thing and literally before online was a thing, I haven't really kept up with dating and technology. 

I have friends who got divorced and dipped back into dating and used online dating apps. Over 300 million people use dating apps worldwide, according to a 2023 report by Business of Apps. To visualize this figure, it’s almost the entire population of the U.S. or half of Europe’s population.

Tinder is an online dating and geosocial networking application launched in 2012. On Tinder, users “swipe right” to like or “swipe left” to dislike other users’ profiles. A profile has their photos, a short bio, and some of their interests. Tinder uses a “double opt-in” system, also called “matching”, where two users must like each other before they can exchange messages. In 2022, Tinder had 10.9 million subscribers and 75 million monthly active users.

Renate Nyborg was Tinder’s first female CEO, but she recently left the popular dating app and launched Meeno which is described as relationship advice rather than dating. For example, you might ask for advice about dealing with your boss. The Meeno app uses artificial intelligence (AI) to help solve relationship problems. She predicts that the future will be less about online dating and more about real-life encounters.

The numbers for online dating are huge but Nyborg and others see a trend (with Gen Z in particular – 18 to 25-year-olds) that they are more interested in meeting people organically.

When she left Tinder, she had said she wanted to use tech to “help people feel less lonely” and dating is only a part of that. According to a 2023 report on loneliness commissioned by the European Commission, at least 10% of European Union residents feel lonely most of the time. A Pew Research study revealed that 42% of adults surveyed in the US said they had felt lonely during the COVID-19 pandemic. So, Meeno is intended to be your mentor, distinct from a virtual girlfriend, boyfriend, clinical therapist, or coach.

What can AI do in all this? Broadly, AI can speed up the processing of all these apps. It can analyze very quickly user behavior patterns and datasets to identify potential matches based on shared interests, values, and preferences. AI can filter profiles for inappropriate content, such as nudity or hate speech. It can analyze a user’s swiping patterns, interests, answers to questions, and personality results to introduce them to tailored recommendations.

There are other apps, like Blush, Aimm, Rizz, and Teaser AI, that use personality tests and physical type analysis to train AI-powered systems. Some apps use machine learning algorithms to scan for attraction and then suggest images of real people that the app thinks the user might find attractive. these are more for “dating” than everyday relationships which is Meeno’s current target.

This post first appeared in a different format on Weekends in Paradelle