1990 Web Archive

Total Pages

4,218,903

Across 187k unique domains

Raw Storage

1.84 TB

WARC & WARC-1.1 formats

Time Span

1990–1999

98.7% coverage rate

API Requests

12.4M

Last 30 days

Recent Archive Index

Year	Domain / Path	Format	Size	Hash	Status
1995	geocities.com/area51/cyber/	HTML	14.2 KB	sha256:8f3a...	ARCHIVED
1997	angelfire.com/tx/dragonlords/	HTML+MIDI	89.6 KB	sha256:4b1c...	ARCHIVED
1998	web.archive.org/mirror/dotcom/	WARC	2.1 MB	sha256:9d2e...	PARTIAL
1999	netscape.com/home/users/	HTML+GIF	34.8 KB	sha256:1a7f...	ARCHIVED
1994	info.cern.ch/demo/	WARC	4.7 MB	sha256:c4d8...	ARCHIVED

Preservation Methodology

Temporal Crawling

Custom Heritrix-based crawlers configured with Netscape 3.x and IE 4.0 user agents to trigger era-specific server responses. Respectful of robots.txt where historically applicable, with academic exemptions for orphaned sites.

Heritrix3 HTTP/1.0 Slow-Parse

WARC Encapsulation

All HTTP(S) transactions, headers, and payloads are written to WARC-1.1 files with concurrent request indexing. Binary assets (GIF, MIDI, PDF) are chunked and cross-referenced for integrity verification.

WARC-1.1 WET/WETI CDX Index

Cryptographic Verification

Every archived resource is hashed using SHA-256 and anchored to a public ledger. Tamper-evident manifests are generated monthly to ensure long-term bit-level preservation and academic reproducibility.

SHA-256 Ledger-Anchor Audit-Log

API Access & Integration

Query the research index programmatically. Authentication via Bearer token required. Rate limited to 100 req/min for standard tier.

                
# Example: Fetch metadata for a specific capture
GET https://api.1990webarchive.org/v2/captures\?
  domain=geocities.com\&
  year=1995\&
  format=json\&
  limit=50

# Headers
Authorization: Bearer <YOUR_TOKEN>
Accept: application/json
                
            

ℹ️ Bulk exports (>10k records) require a research grant application. Datasets are provided as compressed WARC bundles or Parquet files for pandas/Spark compatibility.

Academic Publications

DOI: 10.1145/3294045.3294048

Preserving the Pre-WWW: Archival Strategies for 1990–1993

Authors: E. Vance, M. Lin, J. Okafor. Published in: Digital Preservation Forum, 2021.

View Paper →

DOI: 10.1007/s11023-022-09561-0

Network Archaeology: Mapping GeoCities Topology via Link Graphs

Authors: S. Chen, R. Dubois. Published in: Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage, 2022.

View Paper →

DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.1038492

The 1990 Web Archive Dataset v3.2: Technical Report & Schema

Authors: 1990 Web Archive Engineering Team. Published: Zenodo Repository, 2023.

View Paper →