I just found a website called the Internet Archive and it’s WayBackMachine. You can enter a website URL and it brings you a table of the dates it has snapshots of this website. So I entered my former homepage URL and was in the unexpected situation that I could see the page as it looked like in 2002 (look at the screenshot below).

I don’t have the code base of these pages (plain HTML, written using Vim and organized with CVS as the footer message reveals) and I didn’t miss it either. I think forgeting and (ony limited) rememberance is a high value of our brain. And if I don’t like to remember my old website and dropped these bytes from my computers hard disk, it might have happened because it was time doing so. Why do other people think these bytes need to be kept for future generations?

Hey guys: Take the money you spend for maintaining this archive (you claim to have currently  85 billion pages in your archive) and invest it in useful things! You need a clue? Donate some hundret one laptop per child notebooks to some schools in asia or africa.