Len and board,

Since the subject has come up once again, I won't go into the issues of getting the site found/saved/up again, but instead let you know about a way to glimpse at least portions of the old site.

This is through a thing called "The Wayback Machine", a free service by an organization known as Archive.org. For years, maybe still, their automated bots would scour the net, and when landing on a site would take a 'snapshot' of the site, sort of a mini-copy. They would store it, and go back when changes were sensed or time passed. Many variables at work: it didn't always cover the entire site or deep dive into the furthest reaches, as time passes some things were not kept current (especially images), and because of the nature, you can't be certain that links to something else still work.

PenTrace was never organized too well, so this affects the results. However, I will put a link below that you can click on, which leads to a "Calendar" of all the times newpentrace.net was archived. You will see a timeline at the top, with a block for each year and black graph marks in each year; this seems to span 2014 through 2026. If you click on a year, the calendar for that year appears below, and will show colored dots on the dates that the site was archived. Hovering over a dot will cause a little box appear, and one or more times will appear, in the form of hh:mm:ss. These are the actual links, and if you click on it, it will open an instance of how the site appeared on that day and time. You can see the articles on the lower part and click on them, returning full or partial results. (Tip: when you click on the time, try to use something like "Open Link in New Tab (or Window)" so that you can keep the calendar ready to use again.

This isn't foolproof, and it is up to you how much searching around in what they have saved. If you have some tech savvy, there are other tools available to see how/what archive.org did in the process of saving the site info, accessed through various buttons at the top of the page. I think for those of you with a long history on the PenTrace, it may be fun to see at least part of the old site, though it is far from perfect or complete. I have a LOT of thoughts about how anything going forward should be done, but that is separate. I just thought people here would like to see a possible way to look at the past efforts. I get misty-eyed when I see a photo of Giovanni...

Link to the Calendar of NewPentrace.net at archive.org

Respectfully submitted,
Jon