The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine holds over 424 billion webpages, making it the largest publicly accessible archive in the world. Thus far, much of the research on the Machine has approached the technology using computational thinking. This type of thinking treats technology operationally, as something that we can use to do jobs for us. This article takes a different approach. It steps back from computational thinking to consider the language we use to apprehend technology. It argues that the metaphors we use actually obfuscate, rather than merely describe, the operations of the Machine. By making explicit the workings of these metaphors, the article draws attention to, and thus counteracts, this obfuscation. In so doing, these notes on the Wayback Machine point more widely towards the usefulness of a language-oriented approach to other technologies.

Internet档案馆的Wayback Machine拥有超过4,240亿个网页，使其成为世界上最大的可公开访问的档案馆。到目前为止，有关Machine的许多研究都使用计算思想来接近该技术。这种思维将技术视为可操作的技术，可以用来为我们做工作。本文采用了不同的方法。它从计算思维退回到考虑我们用来理解技术的语言。它认为，我们使用的隐喻实际上混淆了而不是仅仅描述了机器的操作。通过明确说明这些隐喻的工作原理，本文引起了人们对这种混淆的注意，从而消除了这种混淆。这样，