Concept

Wayback Machine

Overview

The Wayback Machine is a digital archive of the World Wide Web founded by the Internet Archive, an American nonprofit organization based in San Francisco, California. Launched for public access in 2001, the service allows users to go "back in time" to see how websites looked in the past. Founders Brewster Kahle and Bruce Gilliat developed the Wayback Machine to provide "universal access to all knowledge" by preserving archived copies of defunct web pages.

The name is a reference to the fictional time-traveling device of the same name from the animated cartoon Rocky and Bullwinkle from the 1960s. In a segment of the cartoon entitled "Peabody's Improbable History", the characters Mr. Peabody and Sherman use the "Wayback Machine" to travel back in time to witness and participate in famous historical events.

The Wayback Machine's earliest archives go back at least to 1995, and by the end of 2009, more than 38.2 billion webpages had been saved. As of October 2025, the Wayback Machine has archived more than 1 trillion web pages and well over 99 petabytes of data.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

Possible passages

Found by search and not yet checked by a person; they may only mention the idea in passing.

1. In the past, the naive assumption that paper would last forever produced a cavalier attitude toward life cycles. The transient nature of the electronic media has compelled people to recognize and accept upfront the concept of life cycles in place of permanency. Digital standards have to be developed and set in a cooperative context to ensure efficient exchange of information. Moreover, during this transition period…

   Library of Congress, Workshop on Electronic Texts

   States what Wayback Machine is.

   Read the chapter · Open in the reader

2. The curiosity entertained by all civilized nations, of inquiring into the exploits and adventures of their ancestors, commonly excites a regret that the history of remote ages should always be so much involved in obscurity, uncertainty, and contradiction. Ingenious men, possessed of leisure, are apt to push their researches beyond the period in which literary monuments are framed or preserved; without reflecting…

   David Hume, The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol. I., Part A.

   Close in meaning to Wayback Machine; the term itself is not named.

   Read the chapter · Open in the reader

3. "Copyright owner," with respect to any one of the exclusive rights comprised in a copyright, refers to the owner of that particular right. A work is "created" when it is fixed in a copy or phonorecord for the first time; where a work is prepared over a period of time, the portion of it that has been fixed at any particular time constitutes the work as of that time, and where the work has been prepared in different…

   Library of Congress. Copyright Office, Copyright Law of the United States of America

   Close in meaning to Wayback Machine; the term itself is not named.

   Read the chapter · Open in the reader

Philosophers who discussed Wayback Machine

• Harry Frankfurt
• Eric Voegelin
• Frank Cameron Jackson
• Hans-Hermann Hoppe
• Sam Harris
• J. L. Mackie
• Hubert Dreyfus
• Michael Williams (philosopher)

Related ideas

• Artificial intelligence
• Internet Archive
• The Guardian
• BBC
• St. Martin's Press
• Social science
• The New York Times
• The New Yorker
• University of California
• University of California, Berkeley
• Hearsay
• San Francisco
• Copyright
• Usenet

Place in the tradition

Part of Fundamentalism.

Explore Wayback Machine in the interactive graph →