Bourbon Bytes

The front page, 29 November 1999

the oldest capture · click to open the shelf copy

What didn’t survive

• The real estate page (real_estate.htm) and an older home page (index_old.htm) are linked from the 1999 front page but were never archived. Those links now open a “not archived” note.
• Almost every image. Only images/exposure.gif was ever captured. In November 2026 we searched again for the rest: every Wayback Machine index entry for bourbonbytes.com (all hosts, both schemes, any file type or status), direct Wayback requests for each missing file, Arquivo.pt, the old shaggyshaw.com server and the other recovered archives. archive.today and the Library of Congress web archive couldn’t be searched from here. None of the 20 other images turned up anywhere: the header art, both logos, menu bar, buttons, banners, background tiles, bumper sticker, rotating ads and hit counter. Where a missing image sat on a page, a dashed box of the same size now names the file. On the 1999 menu, the button labels in that box come from the page’s own text links, so the menu still works. The rotating ad panel (a Java applet) and the background tiles leave no box.
• bourbonbytes.net and bourbonbytes.org have no Wayback captures at all.
• After March 2001 the Wayback Machine only recorded the domain’s robots.txt (2003–2007). Today the name belongs to an unrelated site.

How this copy was made

• Each page is a byte-for-byte copy of its Wayback capture. Where a page was captured more than once, every capture was identical.
• Only links and missing images were changed: links between pages point inside this copy; the link to www.bourbonbytes.com goes to this copy’s home page; links to outside sites go to the Wayback Machine’s 1999 copies; and the old email addresses open the “not archived” note, because the domain is no longer this site’s.
• A small “← Dusty Library” tag sits in the corner of each page.

Capture Ledger