Oh my oh my: labs.blogs.com and the internet way back machine

"If I could save time in a bottle, the first thing that I'd like to do, is to save every day 'til eternity passes away..." — Jim Croce

The internet way back machine is the new version of the Library of Alexandria from Ancient Egypt in that you can browse through over 240 billion (billion with a "b") web pages archived from 1996 to a few months ago. You can check it out for yourself.

• http://archive.org/web/web.php

I used it to look at my blog. It was a blast from the past. Look at this version from May 14, 2007. The blog had only been around for about a month.

Look at that banner and picture. Holy cow. I still had contact lenses. Now look at a year later, May 13, 2008:

You can see that I added badges to the Autodesk Labs site for What's for me? and What's New?. At the time, the Labs home page could not be viewed as sorted by Industry nor by Product, so I created blog pages to prototype this idea. Those pages still exist as historical archives.

Now check out July 15, 2009. The Autodesk Marketing team provided me with less garish banners. I added a widget that showed the geographical locations of visitors to the blog. Facebook and Twitter start to have a presence.

Then there's April 20, 2010.

I created a banner using the suspension mechanism that we featured in Project Freewheel that eventually graduated to the Autodesk Freewheel we have today.

If you look at January 3, 2012, you can see I took the Labs idea literally and used imagery from a chemistry set. When I was in 8th grade, I wanted to be a chemist. For my face, I was using the mesh-picture generated by what is now 123D Catch:

Here's what it looks like as of 2 days ago.

Even though you can see this now, I included that last one because years from now, we will look at this blog article and think "my oh my -- how things have changed."

Thanks for taking a walk down memory lane on a Friday.

Memories are alive in the lab.