Wayback when isn't so way back

Wired News today has an article about a web archive called the Wayback Machine which is a 'digital library tool' to search for and view archived versions of web sites from 1996 onward. I wish this would have been available a few years ago when I was working on the Perl history as google was only in beta at the time and much of the early years of Perl-ish stuff on the web had already long since vanished. They say the average lifespan of a web site/page is 100 days and, considering how much URL maintainence I have to give to the over 500 URLs on the Perl Timeline alone, I don't doubt it.

When I went looking for perl.org and perl.com on the wayback machine, I only got as far back as a month ago. Well, I guess it's something. However, in between the 'come back later due to higher than expected load' messages, python.org has pages all the way back to 14 April 1997. I wonder if this is a python conspiracy :) I wonder if anyone actually saved some of the original pages from perl.org, pm.org, etc. since the wayback machine doesn't have them it might be nice to archive them ourselves for grins.

n.b. Well, I knew as soon as I wrote that I'd find everything....note to self, the trailing slash on the base URL in the wayback machine is important. However, I must admit it is a treat to compare the old CPAN FAQ to the new CPAN FAQ :) I guess I'll have to go snarf the older stuff and make .pdfs out of them for the Perl history archive since the wayback machine could use way more power. Way.