Wayback Machine

The Wayback Machine is a digital archive of the World Wide Web founded by the Internet Archive, an American nonprofit organization based in San Francisco, California. Launched for public access on October 25, 2001, the service allows users to go "back in time" to see how its catalogued websites looked in the past. Founders Brewster Kahle and Bruce Gilliat developed the Wayback Machine to provide "universal access to all knowledge" by preserving archived copies of defunct web pages. The name is a reference to the fictional time-traveling device of the same name from the animated cartoon The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends which ran from 1959 to 1964. In a segment of the cartoon titled "Peabody's Improbable History", the characters Mr. Peabody and Sherman use the "Wayback Machine" to travel back in time to witness and participate in famous historical events. The Wayback Machine's earliest archives go back at least to 1995; by the end of 2009, more than 38.2 billion webpages had been saved. As of October 2025, the Wayback Machine has archived more than 1 trillion web pages and well over 99 petabytes of data.