Just blocks from the Presidio of San Francisco, the national park at the base of the Golden Gate Bridge, stands a gleaming white building, its façade adorned with eight striking Gothic columns.

But what was once the home of a Christian Scientist church is now the holy grail of Internet history — the Internet Archive, a nonprofit library run by a group of software engineers and librarians, who for nearly 30 years have been saving the web one page at a time. Advertisement

Inside the stained-glass-adorned sanctuary, the sounds of church sermons have been replaced by the hum of servers, where the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine preserves webpages.

The Wayback Machine, a tool used by millions every day, has proven critical for academics and journalists searching for historical informatio

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