The Richmond is Home to 1 Trillion Web Pages

Have you ever used the Wayback Machine to see what the web looked like in the ‘90s? I certainly have. I look back at old message boards and blogs where I used to post as a teenager, sometimes with nostalgia…other times embarrassment. I dig through old text files and ASCII art from when I followed the ezine, BBS, and warez scenes, back when we chatted on IRC. I look back at terrible economic predictions that never came to pass, or old music festival lineups I’d forgotten about.

The Wayback Machine makes it easy for you to see what a website looked like at different points in the past. It is a cultural snapshot. Take MTV.com, for instance. The channel is set to shut down on December 31, 2025. But the Wayback Machine lets me browse MTV.com as it existed in the early 2000s, a time when it was thriving. Here's a snapshot from December 2001. Notice the Road Rules promos, news stories about Mystikal and Bin Laden, and Destiny's Child looking ahead to 2002.

The organization behind the Wayback Machine is the Internet Archive, and you can browse it on the web at archive.org. But the Internet Archive is much more than a website, it's a physical place right here in the Richmond District. If you walk down Clement Street until you hit Funston, you’ll see a building that looks like a Greek temple with white columns. On the roof you can see the number 1,000,000,000,000 (one trillion), the number of web pages they've archived. Every Friday at 1pm, they open their doors for a public tour.

Brewster Kahle founded the Internet Archive in 1996 to create a free “digital library of everything” and ensure open democratic access to knowledge. While everyone else was still trying to figure out what the Internet even was, he was already thinking about the importance of saving it.

At 1 p.m. on the dot Kahle himself came out to greet our group of a dozen visitors. He asked how we'd heard we could visit the Archive, genuinely interested in how we found the place. Then he proceeded to spend the next hour showing us the Internet Archive, which, when you consider its scale, is probably one of the most important preservation projects in history. He personally walked us through the Archive, demonstrating its years of experiments and telling its stories. He was clearly full of passion for what he and his team have built.

He led us through a series of homebrew projects the staff has built over the years. At one station, he stepped up to a custom controller mounted on a pedestal. It was a red box with colorful arcade buttons. I think there was a Raspberry Pi inside, connected to a large screen. On the display was a mosaic of thousands of tiny website screenshots, tiled together like a map you could explore.

He pressed the buttons to pan around this giant visualization of the internet. Imagine Google Maps, but instead of streets, you're looking at photos of website homepages. You see interesting clusters of color. Some are bland corporate websites, some are colorful personal web pages, and some are the websites of now defunct magazines. It's a massive art piece representing the entire archived web.

A menu let him switch between years, and we watched as he demonstrated how a site's design evolved over time. He was clearly having a lot of fun with the whole thing, zooming in on random sites, watching the group react.

At another station, he booted up Prince of Persia (the original 1989 game), running it right from the Archive's servers in a webapp that emulates old software. The game appeared in a browser window on archive.org, complete with metadata showing it had been viewed 49,663 times with 244 favorites. It's like having every floppy disk from the era available in the cloud, ready to plug in and play. You can even try it yourself at home.

Perhaps my favorite discovery was a screen in the hallway showing a Twitch-style livestream of staff digitizing microfiche. On the right side of the screen, a live chat scrolls by. Viewers from around the world are asking questions and sharing comments: "words can't describe how much I love internet archive, i post to it everyday." Someone writes "Good morning from Reno city hall!" and "scanner is acting up again gonna have to do a restart ughhh." The project added geeky fun and interactivity to what might seem like a tedious process.

We then went upstairs to the main room, where the Internet Archive hosts events. Here it became clear that we were in a former Christian Science church. The space is gorgeous with stained glass windows and a beautiful dome ceiling. At the front is a large screen that displays the Internet Archive logo.

Below the arches of the corner wall are three black towers with blinking blue lights, each branded with the Internet Archive logo. These servers have petabytes of storage and physically store years of digital history.

The Internet Archive recently hit a major milestone of one trillion web pages preserved. That milestone was recognized by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. A framed poster in the building commemorates the milestone: "Internet Archive Day," October 22, 2025, celebrating one trillion web pages archived and the Archive's 29th anniversary.

One of the most striking features of the space is the more than 100 statues of employees who have been on staff over the years. These are physical monuments to the people behind the Internet Archive. Among the statues is Aaron Swartz, co-founder of Reddit and contributor to the Archive's Open Library project. Swartz took his own life in 2013 while facing federal prosecution for downloading academic articles. His statue is a reminder that the Archive's mission goes deeper than preserving old websites.

If you want to learn more about Aaron’s story, there is a documentary about it called The Internet’s Own Boy, which is fittingly released as Creative Commons, and you can watch it for free online.

When I left the Internet Archive, I noticed the "Big Free Library", a sidewalk book exchange matching the building's logo. Across the street from the building I noticed a van that said Internet Archive and had graffiti that said I ❤ SF.

Why do we have museums and libraries? Why preserve old stuff? Because without artifacts of our culture, we have no memory and no way to learn from its successes and failures. The Internet Archive is doing this for the digital age, and doing it right here in the Richmond, led by a founder who still shows up every Friday to tell strangers why it matters.

Nearly 40 percent of websites published before 2013 are no longer accessible, and a quarter of the web pages published between 2013-2023 no longer exist. In early 2025, data removal became a hot topic when the administration removed over 8,000 web pages related to climate change, DEI, and public health. It was a stark reminder that if we don't archive these things, they can simply vanish when the powers that be attempt to rewrite history.

If you want to contribute to the Internet Archive, you can donate, volunteer, upload materials, or contribute code to their open-source crawling projects. Showing up for the Friday afternoon tour is a perfect place to start. It's free, it's fascinating, and you get to meet some of the people who make it all work. Plus you might get some free ice cream.