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IMAGINE a time machine that could show you the web of yesteryear. That鈥檚 the promise of Memento, a system demonstrated at the Library of Congress in Washington DC on Monday.
Memento eliminates the hassle of navigating deep archives of old web pages. It uses a modified browser and server to let users easily retrieve pages that were online on a certain date.
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The system exploits the internet鈥檚 ability to get different content from the same URL 鈥� such as English or French-language pages 鈥� depending on the user鈥檚 computer settings. Memento users enter a date in the browser鈥檚 鈥渢ime travel鈥� menu, says developer Herbert Van de Sompel of the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, and the server delivers pages that were online at that time.
