Facebook at 21

I saw that today is the anniversary of the start of Facebook back in its undergraduate days of 2004. An old post on the now-defunct Writer's Almanac did a nice job of summarizing that early history, so I am using most of it here.

The social networking site Facebook was launched from a Harvard University dorm room on February 4, 2004 by  sophomore Mark Zuckerberg in his dorm room (Suite H33 in Kirkland House). He was aided by three other 19-year-olds.

Zuckerberg was a smart, middle-class kid from Dobbs Ferry, New York who started writing computer software when he was 12. In high school, he created a program called Synapse Media Player and was offered millions of dollars for the product and job offers by both Microsoft and AO. But he passed on them in order to attend Harvard instead.

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original logo

The program he created at Harvard was called Facemash. It displayed two student photos side by side and asked people to rank who was hotter. It would later be duplicated in various forms as a "hot or not" game. In the site’s first four hours online, the photos were viewed 22,000 times. The site was shut down by Harvard a few days later. It so popular that it overwhelmed their server, but also because there were privacy violations since Zuckerberg had acquired the photos for Facemash by hacking into Harvard’s photo directory.

A couple of months later, Zuckerberg began writing code for a site that would allow students to view each other’s photos and some basic personal information. This site, TheFacebook, was launched on this day in 2004 at www.thefacebook.com.

More than a thousand students signed up within 24 hours, and after a month, half of Harvard’s undergraduates had signed up. Zuck was in trouble again, this time with three seniors who claimed that they had hired Zuckerberg to create a similar site, but that Mark had stolen their idea. Several years later, they reached a multimillion-dollar settlement.

The Internet Is Not Forever

In an article by S.E. Smith on The Verge, the author says that "Every few days, I open my inbox to an email from someone asking after an old article of mine that they can’t find. They’re graduate students, activists, teachers setting up their syllabus, researchers, fellow journalists, or simply people with a frequently revisited bookmark, not understanding why a link suddenly goes nowhere. They’re people who searched the internet and found references, but not the article itself, and are trying to track an idea down to its source. They’re readers trying to understand the throughlines of society and culture, ranging from peak feminist blogging of the 2010s to shifts in cultural attitudes about disability, but coming up empty."

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A recent Pew Research Center study on digital decay found that 38 percent of webpages accessible in 2013 are not accessible today. Pages are taken down, URLs are changed, and entire websites vanish. This happens with personal website and blogs but also with scientific journals and local news sites.

Yes, there are places like the wonderful Internet Archive that tries to preserve some sites and pages, but even that is incomplete if their archived version links to a dead page. I can find some archived versions of my own logs and websites in that archive but it is hardle complete. A complete archive would be an impossible task.

The article was titled What happens when the internet disappears? but the Internet itself is not disappearing, though significant prts of it are already gone.

During my time working at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, I had quite robust personal website. This blog actually was hosted there at the beginning. Thankfully, Tim and I moved Serendipity35 before both of us left the university. I was able to change links on my website to point to new locations of mine, but although for some reason my webspace still is online, I don't have privileges to change anything anymore. That means that things that are out of date or just plain wrong are still there - and people do find those pages.

A page I have there about some early experimenting I did with the crude chatbot ELIZA was found by a researcher writing about the chatbot's history, and a producer from BBC Radio found it and did an interview with me about it for a program. I wish I could update it, but that's not possible on that server.

Smith says in that article "Every digital media format, from the Bernoulli Box to the racks of servers slowly boiling the planet, is ultimately doomed to obsolescence as it’s supplanted by the next innovation, with even the Library of Congress struggling to preserve digital archives."

Books and letters crumble, artwork disintegrates and photography fades, and though we try to save the most important things, we don't know what will be important in the next century.

Are You Ready For Y2K38?

 

Do you remember the Y2K scare? It is also known as the Millennium Bug. On this Eve of a new year, I am recalling this scare that stemmed from a widespread concern in the late 1990s that many computer systems would fail when the year changed from 1999 to 2000.

Why? Many older computer systems and software programs represented years using only the last two digits (e.g., "1999" was stored as "99"). It was feared that when 2000 arrived, these systems might interpret "00" as 1900 instead of 2000, leading to several problems.

Systems that relied on accurate date calculations could produce errors or fail entirely. For example, financial systems calculating interest rates or loan payments might miscalculate. Concerns arose about critical systems in utilities, transportation, healthcare, and government shutting down. Files or databases might become corrupted due to incorrect data processing.

Probably the greatest concern was in banking and finance where it was feared that miscalculated transactions, stock market crashes, or ATM malfunctions might occur.

Some people predicted power grid failures or water system disruptions, and aviation navigation systems and air traffic control collapsing.

What if there were malfunctioning military systems, including nuclear launch systems?

And so, billions of dollars were spent worldwide to identify, update, and test potentially vulnerable systems. IT professionals worked tirelessly to ensure compliance before the deadline.

What Happened? The transition to the year 2000 was largely uneventful. A few minor issues were reported, but there were no catastrophic failures. It wasn't that there was no reason to be concerned, but the successful outcome is often credited to the massive preventive effort rather than the fears being overblown.

The Y2K scare highlighted the importance of forward-thinking in software development and helped establish rigorous practices for handling date and time in computing. If you want to start preparing or worrying now for the next similar scare, the Y2K38 Problem (Year 2038 Issue) arises from how older computer systems store time as a 32-bit integer, counting seconds since January 1, 1970 (Unix time). On January 19, 2038, this count will exceed the maximum value for a 32-bit integer, causing a rollover that could result in misinterpreted dates or system crashes. This potentially affects embedded systems, infrastructure, and older software. Modern systems are increasingly being updated to 64-bit time representations, which kicks the problem far into the future.

The Wayback Machine

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The Wayback Machine (part of https://web.archive.org) has been making backups of the World Wide Web since 1996. Mark Graham, its director, describes it as "a time machine for the web." It does that by scanning hundreds of millions of webpages every day and storing them on their servers. To date, there are nearly 900 billion web pages backed up. Computer scientist Brewster Kahle says "The average life of a webpage is a hundred days before it's changed or deleted."

The first time I heard the name "Wayback Machine" I immediately thought of the fictional time-traveling device used by Mister Peabody (a dog) and Sherman (a boy) in the animated cartoon The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends. In one of the show's segments, "Peabody's Improbable History", the characters used the machine to witness, participate in, and often alter famous historical events.

Sherman and Peabody

Sherman and Peabody

It has been many years since I watched these cartoons, but I recall them as funny and educational. I might be wrong about the latter observation.

I visited the website today and searched this blog's URL https://www.serendipity35.net and found that our site has been saved 153 times between February 8, 2009, and May 3, 2024. However, this blog started in February 2006, but that was when it was a little project in blogging I started with Tim Kellers when we were working at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. At that time it was hosted on NJIT's servers, so our URL was http://dl1.njit.edu/serendipity, for which there is no record. Perhaps, the university did not allows the Wayback Machine to crawl our servers.

serendipity35 2009

According to Wikipedi's entry, The Wayback Machine's software has been developed to "crawl" the Web and download all publicly accessible information and data files on webpages, the Gopher hierarchy, the Netnews (Usenet) bulletin board system, and downloadable software. The information collected by these "crawlers" does not include all the information available on the Internet, since much of the data is restricted by the publisher or stored in databases that are not accessible. To overcome inconsistencies in partially cached websites, Archive-It.org was developed in 2005 by the Internet Archive as a means of allowing institutions and content creators to voluntarily harvest and preserve collections of digital content, and create digital archives.

Crawls are contributed from various sources, some imported from third parties and others generated internally by the Archive. For example, crawls are contributed by the Sloan Foundation and Alexa, crawls run by Internet Archive on behalf of NARA and the Internet Memory Foundation, that mirror Common Crawl

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A screenshot from the blog from a decade ago (2014).

Searching on another website of mine - Poets Online - I find pages from 2003 when it was hosted on the free hosting platform Geocities. There are broken lonks and missing images but they give a taste of what the site was back then in the days before customizable CSS and templated websites. They have archived a page from March of this year and most of the links and some images come through.

The online Wayback Machine is not the one that sparked by time-traveling imagination as a child. Yes, I wanted to accompany Sherman and Mr. Peabody, but I will have to be content to the time travel of looking at things from my past on and offline.

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Screen shot from DVD of Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons., Fair use, Link