New Digs for the Wayback Machine

OK, I'm a history buff, and I am also impressed by cutting-edge design and engineering, which is why I'm jazzed about the new data center recently built by The Internet Archive.

The organization needed a new home for its Wayback Machine, an online compendium of more than 85 billion Web pages dating back to 1996. Want to see what the first iteration of IT Business Edge looked like on June 13, 2003? Click here.

Because the service is growing by about 100 TB a month, the organization turned to Sun to transition from a Linux-based server farm to a Sun Modular data center consisting of Sun Fire x4500s running Solaris 10. The center can handle 500 inquiries per second, and the entire site is mirrored at the Bibliotecha Alexandrina in Alexandria, Egypt, for disaster recovery.

There's a lot of good stuff in the machine, for people who are searching from actual data or those who just want to see how Web page design has evolved over the years. It's a good thing my high school yearbook photo pre-dates the Internet.