A simple, CGI-based frontend for the Wayback Machine which works on old browsers without modern JavaScript or CSS support
The main instance of Wayback Classic is available at wayback-classic.net. It supports both HTTP and HTTPS.
The Wayback Machine contains a lot of websites from the turn of the century which are perfect for browsing on older machines, but the interface the Wayback Machine itself presents is completely incompatible with many such systems, making it very difficult to navigate.
Wayback Classic attempts to provide a fully-functional frontend for the Wayback Machine, providing these systems with access without the extra technological requirements.
This is built on both the CDX API (for retrieving lists of page snapshots), as well as the undocumented __wb/search API used by the Wayback Machine's own frontend to handle site search and determine if a site exists in the archive. More info about the site search can be found in this blog post.
A basic, WEBrick-based development server script is included at bin/dev-server. It defaults to localhost:8000, but the port can be overridden by setting a PORT environment variable.
While the root directory of this repository is intended to map directly to the root htdocs directory of a server, with no dependencies other than the Ruby standard library, a Gemfile is provided under the tests directory which contains dependencies for testing.
For testing purposes, the CGI scripts are loaded as Ruby modules instead of normal scripts, and their lifecycle is exercised by a minimal Rack application to facilitate the use of Capybara.
To run the test suite, open a terminal within the tests directory, and run bundle && bundle exec rake.
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