Inside the Wayback Machine

The Wayback Machine is a very cool effort to essentially archive every bit of information possessed by the human race, starting with anything that’s ever been published on the web. In an interview with project head Brewster Kahle, we find out that they have over 100 terabytes of information already stored (which is five times the Library of Congress) and have written their own operating system overlay (called P2) that trivializes the effort required for writing parallel processing applications. Some very ambitious goals and very useful insights into tech in this interview. The non-profit project has also moved on to start archiving movies and cooperate with other researchers too. One of the neat things about the Wayback Machine is that you can get at old versions of a specific page, such as my homepage as it was on May 19, 2001–damn was it ugly!