If you were thinking of throwing out those back numbers of your favourite IT magazine, can I suggest you re-think? You may be parting with money.

As you’ll have noticed, there is a fad for nostalgia on the back page these days and I can let you into a little secret. I have a wonderful tool to help me search through the past – the Wayback Machine. And just when I’d like to sing its praises, I fell into its black hole. It has nothing at all for the months of December, January or February 2002 from any part of VNUnet (which includes itweek.co.uk). And come to that, it doesn’t go way back; it starts in 1999.

The Wayback Machine stores a snapshot of the complete historical page with links to contemporary stories. But it’s no British Library; you have to be grateful for the few sites it has monitored, and simply accept that the rest are lost forever.

The trouble is, people seem to think that the web keeps everything. As a result, they are blithely throwing away their paper collections of New Scientist and IT Week and Beekeeper’s Journal, and assuming that they’ll be able to Google any historical items.

There is no online edition of IT Week for December 2002. If the archive editions here at IT Week Towers ever got eaten by mice, your collection might acquire a value you never anticipated.