If you don’t already know of Archive.org, I’d suggest you get yourself acquainted. The site essentially serves as the internet’s equivelant of archivial storage, with a goal to catalog most, if not all of the Internet’s vast amounts of information. An impossible goal? Definitely. But it’s still a valiant one nonetheless, and the amount of information the site has gathered over the years is staggering.

Chances are, you’ve already use the Wayback machine in some way or another. As you can imagine, constantly trawling the internet for data reveals a great number of revisions for certain articles, sites or portals. The Wayback machine takes all of these revisions and organizes them neatly, by date, into a virtual timeline allowing users to see exactly how a site may have looked at any given date. In case you’re too young to remember – or in some cases, would rather forget – the Archive has some pretty interesting artifacts from the nineties, and oftentimes with looks we wouldn’t necessarily expect.

But while gathering textual information is all fine and good, what really struck me was the size of their video archive. What many people don’t realise is that, for many older films, and even certain recent releases, the copyright info on particular pieces of media has expired. Without any active copyright license, the film becomes free to share, distribute and watch, without fear of such lovely organizations as the MPAA. A few of the sections more notable selections…

• Attack of the Killer Mushrooms - A masterpiece of Japanese cinema
• The Last Man on Earth – The *original* I am Legend
• Being a Teen in the 1950’s - Awesome and inadvertently funny videos on being a teen in an era past
• Charlie Chaplin – Lots of Charlie. This one in particular is his 23rd film.

And that’s just a small selection of what the site has to offer. Check it out, and tell me if you find anything interesting!