I just want to give a plug for the folks and servers at web.archive.org.

Back in September I was looking for the comments section after one of the articles on the home pages of this forum:
http://www.greenspun.com/com/qtluong.../meridian.html

Specifically I was seeking a posting from a fellow who's perhaps since passed, regarding the provenance of a one-of-a-kind collectible Meridian 45CE I'd just stumbled across and sniped off the auction site, strongly suspecting it's rarity.

Unfortunately that comments page and/or other discussions got inundated with spam responses at some point subsequent to the May 2001 postings, back when this was all hosted on the old Greenspun server. The comments page was wiped clean, not a 404 error but a page that says: "This service has been disabled due to tens of thousands of postings by spammers". But, having the actual URL, I tried plugging it into the Wayback Machine --voila-- there it was, in original form, that a critical bit of information seemingly lost to the ethers was right at my fingertips:

http://web.archive.org/web/200205201.../meridian.html

Pretty freaking slick.

[Also pretty stoked to confirm that my camera was a one-off prototype, last of the lineage.]