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The Atlantic launched its website in November 1995, 138 years after it first went into print. The magazine began in response to one information revolution; the website appeared at the dawn of another. Now, 30 years on from the launch, you can buy a copy of the first printed edition of the magazine on eBay, but you can’t find much of the original website. The internet, notable for remembering just about everything, seems to have forgotten that particular piece of its own history.

In some ways, it’s fitting that so few traces are left. The totality of the internet—as both a gathering of information and a way of life—has made imagining the phases of its history

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