Do you guys ever use the Internet Archive for anything? I agree that they’re doing a great job archiving things, but realistically, through time most of things which happened have been forgotten.

I use the Wikipedia like once a week to look something up, but I only ever used the Internet Archive to look at a early version of my own website. But never for anything else. But perhaps I’m missing out on something?

46 points

It’s a trove of primary source material for historians. Even presuming you don’t personally use it yourself it’s a crucial archive of human history that all will benefit from

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10 points

Yeah, I used it extensively for researching for college papers. They had full newspapers from 100 years ago that I could find the exact advertisement for a concert of a little known composer. Plus there were all sorts of obscure books and old movies that were fantastic to track down. I was able to write a paper in a couple of days that would have taken months of inner library loans otherwise.

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9 points

Yea, without an archive the internet is probably the least permanent form of media we’ve invented so far

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43 points
*

I use it to find old software and games for my retro PC projects, currently working on a Windows XP gaming machine and maybe a DOS machine afterwards.

Without the Internet Archive it would have been a lot harder to find software.

And I love the wayback machine for looking up old websites.

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31 points

reading defunct webcomics

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Wayback machine very often. I also like to watch The Computer Chronicles which is on IA. I can also get old installation ISOs from there.

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26 points

All the time. For websites that are no longer online, it’s invaluable, what’s the alternative?

Things which happened get forgotten because they’re deleted. If something like Internet Archive exists that’s no longer a problem.

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