About Delorean Time Machine

> Marty McFly: Wait a minute, Doc. ... Are you telling me you built a time machine... out of a DeLorean?

> Dr. Emmett Brown: The way I see it, if you're gonna build a time machine into a car, why not do it with some style?

Have you ever tried to read a capsule, only to find it was offline, or worse, just gone?

Have you ever wanted to go back and see what your capsule looked like 2 years ago?

Have you ever wanted to see how a capsule's content has changed and evolved?

On the web, we have the Internet Archive and its amazing Wayback Machine. On Gemini, we... don't. Delorean is my attempt to create a Wayback Machine for Geminispace.

Why?

Back in January 2022, I wrote about some of the things about Gemini that excited me, including:

> Gemini space is dynamic (e.g. ☠️ the Mailing List ☠️). Should we archive content? How would a Wayback machine for Geminispace work?

Gemini Space for hacking

Sure enough, in Feb 2022, ~solderpunk's capsule was down for several days, and no one seemed to have a copy of their "robot.txt for Gemini" document anywhere, which I really needed. So I add a "View Cached Content" feature to my search engine Kennedy, which would let you view the copy of the content as had most recently appeared when I crawled it for indexing. Since only being about to access this cache via search results was clunky if you new a URL you wanted to see, I also added a feature called Delorean. You could put in a gemini URL and see if there was a cached copy of content.

gemini://gemi.dev/gemlog/2022-02-21-kennedy-cached-content.gmi

This was super limited to start, so I deliberately called it a "cache" and not an archive. But in that post is a "Future Directions?" so even in Feb 2022 I was thinking about a making a full archive.