Accessing Authentic Archived Websites Well (aaaww)

I’d like to start this post with a bold claim:

The only currently practical solution for preserving access to archived websites over the long term its to maintain old web browsers and access them using those browsers running on emulated or virtualised hardware.  

The truth of that claim could easily be debated but i’m not going to do that here. Instead I’d like to assume that it’s true and look at what stands in our way from doing that right now. 

Given this (assumption), what happens when we try to do this right now?:

(www.archive.org running in Netscape Navigator on Windows 98 on VMware).

In (other) words it doesn’t work. It doesn’t work because our web-archive interfaces are not designed for old browsers. So this is the first issue. 

This is assuming a workflow in which users load up an old browser and browse amongst links from web archives within the old browser. Another option might be to have the browsing done via a modern host and the viewing/rendering passed to the emulated/virtualised browser. But either way, this seems to be something practical web archivists could be working on. 

Another issue is security, providing web archives via old software may mean providing old software access to the internet. For example it might mean providing windows 95 with IE 5 access to the internet. This should be manageable through good use of firewalls etc. But in theory most modern host environments should be able to be made immune to viruses that might attack the old operating systems. And the emulated systems could be set in “snapshot” mode to ensure any damage done can be recovered simply by restarting the emulated desktop. 

The third and more challenging issue is the ever present issue for emulation solutions: Licensing. Many old browsers require old proprietary operating systems on which to run. This is a legitimate issue that desperately needs to be dealt with if we are to make emulation a viable solution more widely. However this is actually slightly less of a problem with browsers than with other software. Many browsers were freely available and many can be run directly on old Linux distributions or indirectly through API emulators such as WINE on linux. Most old browsers can still be downloaded via sites like OldVersion.com and OldApps.com, or are included in old Linux Distributions and repositories as David Rosenthal likes to point out. 

In fact if I load up the KEEP Emulation Framework’s default Damn Small Linux environment I can browse the Wayback machine with ease, aaaww:

UPDATE:

I may try to build a version of a Damn Small Linux disk image for use in the Emulation Framework with old versions of browsers running on it via WINE. 

The WINE Database shows Old Versions of Internet Explorer, Netscape, Firefox and Opera running well. 

UPDATE #2: I resized the PuppyLinux disk image provided with the Emulation Framework, added Wine 1.5 and installed Internet Explorer 3.01 and Netscape Communicator 4.80 for Windows. The disk image is available here and can be added to the Emulation Framework by following the instructions in this document to “add software”. I may try to add more browsers in the future if anyone is interested.