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IMAGINE a time machine that could show you the web of yesteryear. That’s 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’s ability to get different content from the same URL – such as English or French-language pages – depending on the user’s computer settings. Memento users enter a date in the browser’s “time travel” 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.
