The Past Is Never Past

Picture of me riding the 1999 Paris-Brest-Paris courtesy of the Internet Wayback Machine

A while back my friend Jon finally retired the section of the Mile43 webserver where I used to host a bunch of my old web pages. I have all that old stuff archived locally but I haven't gotten around to finding someplace else to host those pages. Every once in a while, I'll get an email from somebody whose gotten a 404 Not Found error while looking for http://www.mile43.com/peterson/rando.html or some other old page of mine. Eventually, I'll get around to revising and reposting the archives, but since I have a big backlog of new things I'm working on, revisiting the old stuff is definitely a back-burner project. And, thanks to the Internet WayBack Machine, I have a place to point people who are looking for copies of the old things.

The Internet WayBack Machine is one of the lesser-known treasures of the web. Hardworking geeks have been trolling the net since 1996, sweeping up all kinds of stuff and preserving our digital past. These folks are thorough, they've even managed to capture my old stuff. For example:

http://web.archive.org/web/20070623032738/http://www.mile43.com/peterson/rando.html

is a copy of my old index page.

The next time you get a 404 error, copy the address and punch it into the wayback machine at:

http://www.archive.org/web/web.php

As Faulkner observed, "The past is never dead. It's not even past."