This October, the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine is projected to hit a once-in-a-generation milestone: 1 trillion web pages archived. That’s one trillion memories, movements, and movements, preserved for the public forever.
We’ll be commemorating this historic achievement on October 22, 2025, with a global event; a party at our San Francisco headquarters and a livestream for friends and supporters around the world. More than a celebration, it’s a tribute to what we’ve built together: a free and open digital library of the web.
Join us in marking this incredible milestone. Together, we’ve built the largest archive of web history ever assembled. Let’s celebrate this achievement – in San Francisco and around the world – on October 22.
Here are some of the things that are on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine:
Vanishing Culture: Why Preserve Flash?
At the Internet Archive we have a technical marvel: emulators running in the browser, allowing computer programs — after a fashion and with some limits — to play with a single click. Go here, and you’re battling aliens. Go there, and you’re experience what a spreadsheet program was like in 1981. It’s fast, fun and free.
We also encourage patrons to upload the software that affected their early lives, and then encourage others to play these programs with a single click. And so, they do – many, many people working through an admittedly odd set of instructions to make these programs live again.
But the dozens of machines and environments our system supports, one very specific one dwarfs the others in terms of user contributions: thousands and thousands of additions compared to the relative handful of others.
And what is that environment? Flash.
Flash flew across the mid-2000s internet sky in a blaze of glory and with unbridled creativity. It was the backbone of menus and programs and even critical applications for working with sites. But by 2009, bugs and compatibility issues, the introduction of HTML5 with many of the same features, and a declaration that Flash would no longer be welcome on Apple’s iOS devices, sent Flash into a spiral that it never recovered from.
Internet Archive Designated as a Federal Depository Library
Announced today, the Internet Archive has been designated as a federal depository library by Senator Alex Padilla. The detonation was made via letter to Scott Matheson, Superintendent of Documents at the U.S. Government Publishing Office.
Senator Padilla explained the designation in a statement to KQED:
“The Archive’s digital-first approach makes it the perfect fit for a modern federal depository library, expanding access to federal government publications amid an increasingly digital landscape,” Padilla said in a statement to KQED. “The Internet Archive has broken down countless barriers to accessing information, and it is my honor to provide this designation to help further their mission of providing “Universal Access to All Knowledge.”
I am old enough to remember the “Badger Badger Badger – Mushroom Mushroom” from back in the day. It was a big hit in the 1990’s, when nearly everyone who had a computer watched the Badgers.
Know Your Meme reported: Badger Badger Badger is a Flash animation video created by Jonti Picking. The video consists of images of dancing badgers over an electronic song while the word ‘badger” for three measures and changes “mushroom” in the fourth. After about three loops of badgers and mushrooms a mini-chorus about a snake plays as animated snakes crawl across a desert, and the animation loops once again.
People who are much younger than I am might not understand why there are dancing badgers, mushrooms, and snakes. Back then, it was a fun little video that ran on Flash.