Wayback Machine Hits 400,000,000,000! A Judson College 1999 Digital Scrapbook


What I think is going to be just a cursory glance at the archived pages always turns into hours of clicking and remembering! Thank you, Internet Archive – how amazing that all this has survived! We knew that our Judson College website being archived, but did not pay much attention. The old pages looked very clumsy and old-fashioned, so it was somewhat embarrassing that people were able to follow our progress as we slowly (and sometimes painfully) made our way forward.

logo_wayback_210x77The Wayback Machine, a digital archive of the World Wide Web, has reached a landmark with 400 billion webpages indexed.  This makes it possible to surf the web as it looked anytime from late 1996 up until a few hours ago. via Wayback Machine Hits 400,000,000,000! | Internet Archive Blogs.

I followed the Yahoo link  in the post quoted above and clicked through to Judson College.  I was delighted to see the Judson College home page on October 12, 1999 (http://web.archive.org/web/19991012023443/http://home.judson.edu/) with all of the images intact.  At the very bottom I saw what at first looked like the WordPress smiley, but on a closer look turned out to be an underlined period – a barely noticeable link to our experimental MIVA form (that is also archived by Wayback!).  We knew at the time that data-driven websites were the wave of the future and so  started learning how to construct them using MIVA from SoftQuad.  We actually had close to 1,000 pages (10,000 individual files) on our server by 2000, so it will take me a while to follow all the links! Wayback1999-2 We were enthusiastic participants in the Auburn University Faculty Development Consortium (http://web.archive.org/web/20020612025552/http://www.auburn.edu/fdc/)  and the link appeared in 1999 on our website .  I had forgotten that I appeared in one of the photos from the Mini-Sabbatical in September 1999 that I assisted in teaching!