Listener supported WNYC Studios.

It's the Brian Laird Show on WNYC.

Good morning again, everyone.

I'm Bridget Bergen, in for Brian today.

The Internet is a powerful tool that offers us access to a wealth of information at our fingertips.

But that information is also subject to change.

And some changes are garnering increased attention as the Trump

administration deletes government webpages that go against the administration's views.

Names, words, whole portions of the nation's history are being removed seemingly at the press of a

button. But there are tools that can prevent this erasure through a digital

purge. That's where the Internet Archive comes in, and particularly the Wayback Machine, which has

been preserving relics of the Internet for decades. Their first snapshot of WNYC's website was all the way

back in 1998. I cannot imagine what that looks like. But to understand the history

of the wayback machine and the work that they're doing now, we're joined by Mark Graham,

director of the wayback machine at the internet archive. Mark, welcome to WNYC. It's so great to talk

with you. Hey, fantastic. I'm really happy to be. It's so great to talk with you.

Fantastic. I'm really happy to be here. And it truly warms my heart that we had the capture,

the archive of your website from so long ago. I hope it played back well.

I have to go back and look at it. I have not seen that yet, and I am definitely going to check that out. Now before we get too into the weeds,

let's talk about, you know, very broadly, what is this platform that we call the internet?

That we call the internet? Well, it's this, it's a nervous system, a communications platform

for humanity. It's the underlying system, a communications platform for humanity.

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