After reading e-mails about last week's Surfin', it occurred to me that the very comprehensive "Morse Goes to the Movies" Web site that disappeared off the face of the Internet many years ago might be available on the Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive Web site.

Sure enough -- I used the Wayback Machine and found the "Morse Goes to the Movies" Web site archived for March 9, 2001.

The Wayback Machine is a free service that allows you to visit archived versions of Web sites. Simply type in a URL, select a date range and then begin surfing on an archived version of the site. The archive contains more than 85 billion Web pages dating back to 1996; if you know the URL of a defunct Web site, you may be able to find it using the machine.

Not all Web sites are in the archive because, according to the Wayback Machine's FAQ, "the automated Web crawlers were unaware of their existence at the time of the crawl. It's also possible that some sites were not archived because they were password protected, blocked by robots.txt, or otherwise inaccessible to our automated systems."

Surfin' will be eight years old this December and a lot of Web sites mentioned here in the past have come and gone. But, don't give up the ghost; you still may be able to find them using the Wayback Machine.

By the way, I index every installment of Surfin' here. You can use the index to find a topic of interest that Surfin' covered in the past and if it a referenced Web site is no more, the Wayback Machine may come to the rescue.

Until next time, keep on surfin'!

Editor's note: Stan Horzepa, WA1LOU, uses the Wayback Machine to relive the past. To communicate with Stan, send him e-mail or add comments to his blog. By the way, every installment of Surfin' is indexed here, so go look it up.

Stan Horzepa, WA1LOU
Contributing Editor