Yep, I use the wayback machine a few times a week, even at work to look up old information from companies that have vanished and had their websites deleted. It is a great resource.

has saved me a few times finding old software and drivers

Same here. Wayback Machine and Wikipedia were some of noblest ideas/project in respect to the world wide web & humanity.
As in.. They care both about past and future generations.

That's why I also hope that backwards compatibility in modern web browsers stays to last a little longer.
Think of old HTML 1.x, XML and VRML, along with plug-ins like QuickTime, Real Player, Flash/Shockwave and languages like JScript, VBScript and such.
That's why "Quirks mode" and support for pre-Unicode still makes sense to keep around.
Also, that's one of the reasons I keep a copy of IE 5.5 on a Win 98SE virtual machine on my current PC.
And old Mac OSes like System 7-9 / OS X 10.1 - 10.4. Web designers of the past centuries just loved these system. 😉

Last but, not least, there also was another type of internet..
The early "mobile web" based on WAP and i-mode (has Wayback saved these sites, too ?).
Ports of their special browsers for PC work quite well on Win98, too.

adding "id_" to the end of the date string in your web.archive.org URL will display the "original grab" and sometimes that's enough to completely display the webpage in question without the Archive.org navigation tool at the top.

I don't browse my favorite old sites this way because the broken images, non-working FTPs, and missing pages make me cry. 🙁

A few days ago I somehow ended up on Wayback Machine browsing the website of the store where my dad bought our first PC in late 1993. The earliest snapshot I found was from mid 1998, it brought some nice memories since I also purchased my Monster 3D II there around that time... the store is long gone, since the early 00's which makes it even more nostalgic. Other highlights:

• The absurd price difference between the mighty Celeron 300A and the then recently released P2-450!
• AT mini-tower cases were really dirt cheap
• Diamond Multimedia products everywhere: graphics cards, modems, sound cards... I always found it fascinating how they fizzled out afterwards

I use the Wayback Machine irregularly but when I do it comes in very handy. When I wrote my thesis at university I used it extensively and linked consistently to archive.org to obtain maximum integrity of the thesis and the referenced secondary sources.

The beauty of the Wayback Machine lies in the fact, that the original URL is enclosed in the Wayback Machine URL. So even when archive.org goes bust the original URL is still retrievable (even though the resources behind the original URL may be long gone too).

Oh yes, I've been very active at using the WM as soon as I realised that you could retrieve files (demos, shareware etc.) from there, which was some time ago already. I've been documenting the findings here and some stuff also here. This way I would sometimes come across some pretty rare stuff too, like this little game. I also developed an interest in official screenshots for old games (which are now covered by MobyGames' Promo Art section) and retrieved quite a lot of images this way.

Several months ago I had a massive dive into Warcraft II fansites/pages, which yielded huge numbers of custom PUDs, before finally I managed to find what I was after, namely custom levels for Warcraft: Orcs & Humans.

Some of the archived websites may not have any downloads and images of interest but can provide guidance as to what stuff was available back then. For example, I learned about Dead of Night from Electric Games (no idea why they labelled it an RPG though).

Yeah the file archiving is pretty awesome. I use it heavily for drivers/bios from companies that no longer exist.

I need to check out some of dem demos as well 😁

leileilol wrote:

I don't browse my favorite old sites this way because the broken images, non-working FTPs, and missing pages make me cry. 🙁

I know what you mean. The Wayback Machine is really good, but sometimes they only have the text of a website (no graphics or file downloads) or just the first page of a long forum thread and it's annoying that that's all they have of what you were after.

There's so much information from the 'net that's presumably lost forever. You'd think that after so much information being lost through real history (real life stuff, I mean) for the many millenia since we learnt to write, that we'd know to properly back up our digital data for the later generations of people to look through. But apparently not.

Kerr Avon wrote:

leileilol wrote:

I don't browse my favorite old sites this way because the broken images, non-working FTPs, and missing pages make me cry. 🙁

I know what you mean. The Wayback Machine is really good, but sometimes they only have the text of a website (no graphics or file downloads) or just the first page of a long forum thread and it's annoying that that's all they have of what you were after.

There's so much information from the 'net that's presumably lost forever. You'd think that after so much information being lost through real history (real life stuff, I mean) for the many millenia since we learnt to write, that we'd know to properly back up our digital data for the later generations of people to look through. But apparently not.

Well, it depends on how the site was written on whether or not stuff can be backed up properly with the wayback machine.
The wayback machine is not going to be able to recreate all the backend stuff that some sites require.

Active Server Pages (ASP) is just asking for trouble.
Adobe Flash driven sites are also not going to be able to be backed up properly.

And when they first started backing up stuff, it seems like it was kinda super buggy as images and some other stuff doesn't always work properly.

And if you want to back up an ftp, you better do it yourself and upload the whole think to archive.org.

^As for the missing pictures, yes, I think that's annoying, too. 🙁
To be fair, though, it was a mistake by the old web designers to not include alternate descriptions in plain text.
In school, when we took care of our school's homepage, our computer teacher always taught us to add these as a fallback..

Sometimes I come across user pages that list games in a particular genre. A while ago I stumbled upon one with fantasy RPGs:
http://relative-web.com/Software/coolh20/#games

And today I found a similar page about shmups:
http://www.mindspring.com/~raitken/content.html

The good thing about such pages is that they sometimes list some really obscure stuff that is missed by many of the bigger popular download sites of the time.