I love the Wayback Machine

[midjd]

Does anyone else use it? I've only browsed the archived web pages, but have wasted hours there. (web.archive.org)

The Internet Archive is a 501(c)(3) non-profit that was founded to build an Internet library. Its purposes include offering permanent access for researchers, historians, scholars, people with disabilities, and the general public to historical collections that exist in digital format. The Internet Archive includes texts, audio, moving images, and software as well as archived web pages in our collections, and provides specialized services for adaptive reading and information access for the blind and other persons with disabilities.

Once or twice a week, my boss asks me to look up the history of a statute or court rule. This is made difficult by the fact that the entire code section dealing with civil/criminal procedure was recodified in 2004 and none of the previous versions are accessible. But with the Wayback Machine it took me about 2 minutes to find the 2003 version (complete with legislative history), instead of going through the 550+ page bill to find the original cite or walking to the law library. It's these shortcuts that give me time to surf the internet  

It's fun and kind of nostalgic to see what the Yahoo front page looked like in 1997 or 2003, or to read newspaper headlines from a specific date. (I also found my old Angelfire blog from 8th grade... eep!)

Unfortunately the MSN message boards were not archived, although you can get as far as the Post of the Day:
web.archive.org/web/20080310215840/http://moneycentral.msn.com/community/message/default.aspx?

[Wisconsin Beth]

I have a vague thought that lack of funding was causing a multiyear delay for them.