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Current Feature Articles   Jul 05 The Amateur Amateur: Please Answer the Following Question   Jul 04 Youth@HamRadio.Fun: Another Field Day in the Books   Jul 03 Surfin': ATVing Digitally and APRSing Successfully   Jul 01 ARRL In Action: What Have We Been Up to Lately?   Jul 01 It Seems to Us: Support HR 2160!   Jun 28 Dropping in on Field Day   Jun 27 Amateur Radio Quiz: Parting Words   Jun 26 Surfin': Finding Missing Sunspots   Jun 26 The Amateur Radio Crossword Puzzler   Jun 25 Doubling Up on Field Day ARRL Products: History/Adventure (More) The Story of the Queen Mary and W6RO -- DVD. A story about W6RO and its impact on the Amateur Radio Service through its operation aboard the Queen Mary. World War II Radio Heroes: Letters of Compassion -- A story about ham radio operators and others who helped ease worries during a time of war. Don C. Wallace: W6AM, Amateur Radio's Pioneer -- This book traces the life of Don Wallace and with it the early history of Amateur Radio. Edgar Harrison -- Now Shipping! -- A remarkable story of Edgar Harrison and the extraordinary adventures he encountered throughout World War II. RSGB 1940s Amateur Radio Special Edition -- 6 book set.

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This week, Surfin’ finds Amateur Radio Web sites that are no more.

The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine can bring back old Amateur Radio Web sites that have bitten the dust.

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 Simply type in a URL, select a date range and then begin surfing on an archived version of the site.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.

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