Infrastructure & Developer Resources

Technology & Development

Transparent architecture, open APIs, and production-ready SDKs for researchers, historians, and developers building on preserved web data.

System Architecture

A distributed, immutable stack engineered for scale, authenticity, and long-term digital preservation.

🕷️

Crawling Engine

Custom multi-threaded spiders with protocol fallbacks for HTTP/1.0, FTP, and Gopher. Respects robots.txt historically while supporting aggressive archival modes.

Rust • Tokio • 500k req/s
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Immutable Storage

Append-only object storage compliant with WARC/WACZ standards. Triple-replicated across global regions with cryptographic integrity verification.

S3-compatible • WARC/ARCX • SHA-256
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Rendering Pipeline

Headless browser farm configured for legacy user-agent strings. Captures full-page screenshots, PDFs, and interactive DOM states.

Chromium/Playwright • Node • Docker
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Index & Search

Full-text and vector search across 4.2M pages. Supports temporal filtering, technology tagging, and semantic content matching.

OpenSearch • Milvus • Meilisearch
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API & SDKs

Query, download, and reconstruct archived content programmatically. Full REST & GraphQL endpoints available.

Official SDKs

Production-ready libraries for the most popular development environments. All SDKs share a unified type system and handle pagination, rate limits, and authentication automatically.

  • Python v2.4.1Stable
  • JavaScript/TS v1.8.0Stable
  • Go v0.9.2Beta
  • Rust v0.3.0Dev
View SDK Documentation →
python
import archive1990 # Initialize client with API key client = archive1990.Client(api_key="ak_live_...") # Query archived pages from 1998 results = client.search( query="geocities personal homepage", year_range=(1997, 1999), format="warc" ) for page in results.iter_pages(): print(page.url, page.timestamp) page.download(dest="./archive")

Tools & Specifications

Everything needed to integrate, monitor, and contribute to the preservation ecosystem.

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Resource Description Status Endpoint / Link
CLI Tool Terminal interface for bulk crawling, downloading, and verifying WARC files Stable npm i -g @1990web/cli
Webhooks Real-time notifications for crawl completion, integrity alerts, and dataset releases Stable /webhooks
GraphQL API Flexible querying for relationships, metadata graphs, and cross-temporal analysis Beta api.1990archive.dev/graphql
WARC ValidatorStandards compliance checker for IIPC/WARC metadata and stream integrity Dev github.com/1990web/validator

Community & Open Source

We believe digital heritage should be transparent, auditable, and collaboratively improved.

📖 RFC & Specifications

Read and propose changes to our archiving protocols, metadata schemas, and API versioning policies.

Browse RFCs →

🛠️ Open Source Components

Our core crawler, WARC parser, and legacy rendering modules are publicly available under MIT/Apache 2.0.

View Repositories →

🤝 Academic Partnerships

Request dataset access for research. We provide compute credits and dedicated archival queues for universities.

Apply for Access →

💬 Developer Discord

Join 12k+ developers and historians. Get support, share datasets, and track infrastructure updates.

Join Community →

Ready to Build on Preserved History?

Generate an API key, clone a repository, or join our developer program. The first decade of the web is waiting.