There are not even any screen shots of the world’s first web page—the one that actually launched the World Wide Web in August 1991. Amid the explosive growth of internet services such as e-mail, music downloads and video streaming, along with the growth of the web itself, little thought has been given to recording information for posterity. The rapid turnover of content on the web has made total loss the norm. Lacking cultural artefacts, society has no mechanism to learn from previous mistakes.
Internet Archive (is) a free internet library capable of storing a copy of every web page of every website ever to go online. The Wayback Machine allows users to view the library’s archived web pages as they appeared when published. Today the Internet Archive also includes texts, audio, moving images and software. At the last count, its collection contained more than 150 billion items.
An interesting spin-off from the Internet Archive is the Open Library, which aims to provide a web page for every book in existence. The Open Library is not to be confused with Project Gutenberg, founded by the late Michael Hart, the inventor of the electronic book back in 1971. Project Gutenberg offers some 40,000 e-books that can be downloaded free in any of the popular e-reader formats.
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