Wayback_exe

Twitter user @muffinista has created @wayback_exe, a bot that posts images of early web pages, taken from the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine.

Although the bot's necessarily static images can't quite capture the magic of blinking text and GIF marquees that were the spirit of the '90s web, it's an amusing and at times nostalgic look back at how far we've come in the last 20-odd years.


In order to see this embed, you must give consent to Social Media cookies. Open my cookie preferences. AMERICA'S EROTIC PHOTO - stories, leather, sex, bondage, BDSM,BDSM

Jan 1998https://t.co/UsAgBLTXuJ pic.twitter.com/Rj6AkYHJSD — wayback_exe (@wayback_exe) October 20, 2015

Although it's only been operating for a few hours, @wayback_exe has already posted snapshots of sites ranging from an erotic photo competition to the promotional page of Twin Peaks actor James Marshall. Marshall, billed as "Hollywood's Best Kept Secret", is even equipped with an archetypally '90s leather outfit and sultry stare that might have qualified him for the aforementioned erotic photo comp.

In order to see this embed, you must give consent to Social Media cookies. Open my cookie preferences. T-BannerThe James Marshall Homepage

Jun 1997https://t.co/ClD8MMNGgo pic.twitter.com/GfExw9p4tv — wayback_exe (@wayback_exe) October 20, 2015


Historians have already noted that the last traces of the early web are disappearing at a fantastic rate, despite the work of groups such as the Internet Archive. Even award-winning digital reportage produced by news organisations has struggled to stay online, while the ephemeral details of ordinary lives, hobbies and pets that once lived on free web space providers such as GeoCities, Angelfire and Tripod are either long gone or have been abandoned by creators who've forgotten that they ever existed.

The Internet Archive's own Wayback Machine FAQ captures a snapshot of the past, telling us that "the original idea for the Internet Archive Wayback Machine began in 1996, when the Internet Archive first began archiving the web. Now, five years later, with over 100 terabytes and a dozen web crawls completed, the Internet Archive has made the Internet Archive Wayback Machine available to the public."

By July this year, the Wayback Machine contained 23 petabytes of data and was growing by 50-60 terabytes every week. "This eclipses the amount of text contained in the world's largest libraries, including the Library of Congress," the group now states.