This is something I’ve been meaning to write up for a little while and, with the success of the Internet Archive’s recovery from it’s attack, it makes sense to do so now.
So the common view (such as expressed in the tweet above) is that the oldest pages in the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine date from early 1996. This, however, is untrue.
In the mid-90s, as the BBC began to explore the implications of the internet, it launched an internet presence under the banner of ‘The BBC Networking Club’ which it housed under the domain name ‘bbcnc.org.uk’. These first early efforts initially went live on the 11th April 1994.
About a year passed and then, during the March of 1995, someone tasked a computer with crawling the website hosted at ‘www.bbcnc.org.uk’ and then, at an even later date, these crawls found their way onto Archive.org’s Wayback Machine.
It’s possible that the Archive has forgotten that they hold these pages – they’re very difficult to reach through the standard Wayback Machine Web interface – but, with a little poking around via the CDX server, you can get these pages to surface and to be viewable.
Now Period Sites in Period Browsers – my lockdown project – currently only has 33 pages from 1995, but they are a very nice snapshot of the early part of the web and they can be seen here.
And I’ll let you know if I find any other pages from 1995 (or even earlier!).