The Internet Archive is turning twenty. Happy Birthday. So far they have banked hundreds of billions of pages from the internet, among them Green Comet. See Green Comet on the Wayback Machine. Also see the pages where I’ve uploaded the novels Green Comet and Parasite Puppeteers, along with the recorded readings.
Here’s the story from the San Francisco Chronicle:
When the Internet Archive was created 20 years ago, few envisioned how a small galaxy of about 500,000 websites would evolve into the center of human communication and culture. […] the nonprofit San Francisco organization — which celebrated the milestone with a party Wednesday night — curates a vast digital archive that includes more than 370 million websites and 273 billion pages, many captured before they disappeared forever. The organization, founded by computer scientist and entrepreneur Brewster Kahle, now has a virtual storehouse ranging from digitally converted books and historic film to funny memes and audio recordings of Grateful Dead concerts. Future scholars will be able to search through an archive of news talk shows and political advertising to better understand the twists and turns of this year’s presidential election season.
“When Brewster started this, a lot of people thought he was crazy or irrelevant,†said Rick Prelinger, a film archivist and associate professor of film and digital media at UC Santa Cruz.
About 600 people turned out for the party in the Internet Archive’s neoclassic, Greek-columned home, the former Christian Scientist church on Funston Avenue in the Richmond District. Guests included early tech entrepreneur Marc Canter, co-founder of what would become Macromedia, early Apple employee Dan Kottke, and Washington journalist Kathy Kiely. The crowd included past and present Internet Archive employees, and others who volunteered their time or money to help the organization over the years.
The Internet Archive has survived through community donations and by working with about 1,000 libraries around the world that pay the group to help digitize books and other material. Last week, the archive released an easier way to search the Wayback Machine, which has also helped repair 1 million broken citation links on Wikipedia.
Source: Internet Archive, repository of modern culture, turns 20 – San Francisco Chronicle
Go have a look. Browse the archive. You could lose a few hours pawing through websites, music, games, movies and a few surprise, guaranteed.
rjb
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