Stanford's Web Archiving team of Nicholas Taylor and Ahmed AlSum have bought up SWAP, the Stanford Web Archive Portal, using the Open Wayback code developed under IIPC auspices from the Internet Archive's original. And, thanks to the Stanford staff's extraordinary ability to recover data from old backups, it features the very first US web page, bought up by Paul Kunz at SLAC around 6th Dec. 1991.
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Ahmed AlSum details the process of recovering the early SLAC website from the backups. In the process he actually found an obsolescent Web format!
"the first logo used by SLAC was in XBM format, which is no longer supported by modern browsers."
As I've said before, formats from before about 1995 are at risk of obsolescence.
Nicholas Taylor discusses some lessons about Web history from recovering the first SLAC web page.
Thanks for these links. Unfortunately since about two years at least the Internet Archive more and more seems to become a rubbish dump. While the actual web archive has greater and greater "holes" in it, the space is taken up by dubious torrents, sometimes seemingly even malware-infested and with little in the way of bibliographic structuring. Unfortunately no one foresaw the explosive growth of the Internet and at the beginning conventional libraries, while insisting on getting a specimen of each book published, never thought about copying down the Internet in its early history. There is a lot of documentation I collected since the late 1990s the links to which now lead to nowhere ... and that also in the archive.org search. A shame, really.
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