The Wayback Machine

Unraveled was born in July 1998. At the time I was inspired by Lance Arthur’s Soulflare (offline), Auriea Harvey’s entropy8 and Michael Samyn’s zuper! (Auriea and Michael now work together at entropy8zuper). So my plan was to make Unraveled a virtual gallery of sorts.

To accomplish this, I assembled a group of five people who were interested displaying their writing and art. The gallery launched October 1999, but up until then I displayed only a splash page. I always had a bad habit of deleting web pages that I designed. I’m not sure why. Maybe because it was so easy to do? So sometime after the site launched, I deleted that splash page. I thought I would never see it again. So I practically cried when I recently found an archive of Unraveled on the amazing Wayback Machine.

The Wayback Machine, built by a partnership between the Internet Archive and Alexa Internet, contains a five-year, 100-terrabyte collection of Web pages. Just how big is 100-terrabytes? About five times as large as The Library of Congress, which contains about 20 million books. Yeah, that’s pretty big.

So while you’re thinking about it, take this opportunity to visit The Archive and find the website you loved browsing back in the day. It’s like watching the home video’s that your parents made when you were a kid, only this library happens to contain about five billion images.