One of my favorite websites is the waybackmachine.
Once I thought I've lost one of my favorite pictures of when I was a kid. It was a mighty shot that my father, photographer, took of me when, coming back home one day after work, he found me all dirty playing in the garden.
I was a bit sad for the loss, and one night I stumbled upon this lovely website -the waybackmachine - that keeps all the archeology of the web. I only remembered that a copy of my picture was on Geocities, one of the services that Yahoo bought to destroy, but I didn't remember the exact address..
So, I started fiddling around with the waybackmachine..
This is the first page I ever seen on the internet. It was 1996. Altavista, the biggest search engine of the time, didn't even have its own domain.
Hotbot has been a lot of people's favorite engine until the year 2000, when Google came in the picture.
Google killed the competition with its simplicity. One page with pretty much only one form. What a waste of space!
Hotwired, property of Lycos, was one of the only cool magazine about digital life.
... Magically, when I saw this page, my old Geocities adress came to my mind like in an epyphany. A inner voice clearly said: "soho... coffeehouse... 5052 ! http://geocities.com/soho/coffeehouse/5052" ... Let me tap it in, hit enter, and...
Here is my page on June 2001, my proto-blog that was opening with Fancisco Goya's Maya Desnuda.
click click, dig dig... HERE'S THE PICTURE I WAS LOOKING FOR: IT'S THERE !!
Me, 4years old, around the year 1980.
... Once upon a time, when Bitcoin was not even yet a bird in a cage waiting to get liberated and ideas like Steemit were utterly inconceivable, there were cute, luminescent monitors cluttered with small letters that were coming magically there from a phone line! Server came and went, but thanks to the waybackmachine we don't loose anything.
Waiting for Steemit, the IPFS or other solutions to create an immutable and perpetual internet, that's where you have to go to travel back in time:
http://archive.org/web/
Cheers
Berni