Site5 Web Hosting Blog

Apple’s Time Machine, Site5’s Flashback, and a 1981 DeLorean

Posted by Kevin Hazard, October 23rd, 2006

In preparing to write this blog post, several prospective titles were swirling through my mind: “How Apple Learned from Site5,” “Marty McFly Would Choose Site5,” “Flux Capacitor Sold Separately,” and “Apple Copied Our Idea and All We Got Was This Awesome Program” were the frontrunners, but my nagging curiosity as to which year of the DeLorean was used in the filming of the Back to the Future trilogy led me to the short and sweet title, “Apple’s Time Machine, Site5’s Flashback, and a 1981 DeLorean.”

What do these three things have in common?… If you guess that they all use “One-point-twenty-one gigawatts” of power, you may be right (since I really have no concept of how many gigawatts are involved in Site5’s Flashback and Apple’s Time Machine), but the answer we were really looking for is that you can use them all to go back in time.

Note: Please don’t destroy your complete, nearly-functional DeLorean (with Flux Capacitor, of course) in the expectation that Site5 or Apple will be letting you travel through the space-time continuum without the weapons-grade plutonium you have been waiting to show up on eBay. To my knowledge, neither Site5 nor Apple will not physically take you back to a time when the milk in your refrigerator did not smell like old socks and when that mullet you still groom was in style (read: when it was less of a cult-engendering joke than it is now).

What They All Do

• Site5’s Flashback:

  An innovative, easy-to-use, Rails-based versioning system for web hosting customers. With only a few clicks, your entire website can be “Flashed back” to a specific design (seasonal, promotional, etc.) or you can quickly roll back to a dependable version of your site if any of the your design/coding changes don’t work out in a live production environment.

• Apple’s Time Machine:

  Apple looks to have taken the OS restoration functionality to a whole new level. The graphics and features of Time Machine in Leopard are indicative of the millions of dollars in R&D they spent copying our idea.

• 1981 DeLorean (with Flux Capacitor):

  Doc Brown would tell you that the DeLorean (with Flux Capacitor) could potentially ruin the time-space continuum, but I think it would be an awesome Sunday driver. Despite the fact that it was a very marginal-looking “sports car,” it definitely has a lot of character, and I’d bet that you would get more glances on Sunset Blvd. if you drove one of those bad boys than if you were one of the 200 Bentley owners picking up your 3 year-old kid at his/her acting lesson with Dustin Diamond… That doesn’t even take into account that you could use it to go back in time and buy BRK.A when it IPO’d.

Site5 and Apple: Kickin’ It Old School

So here’s the deal (slightly embellished in dramatization):

1. Site5 saw an industry-wide need to improve site management and content backups.
2. Site5 created an innovative website time machine to provide for customers called Flashback.
3. Apple saw the idea when Site5 initially tried to launch it (in December 2005).
4. Site5 continued to work through bugs in the system to bring Flashback to full functionality.
5. Apple realized how genius Site5 was and created a similar feature in their upcoming OS X build.
6. Site5 launches Flashback.
7. Apple releases OS X Leopard (with Time Machine).

Now I will concede that Apple has had a good idea or two in its time (as I am listening to iTunes on my PowerBook with four other Apple-made products within arm’s reach), but it would be pretty cool if our idea was cool enough for Apple to rip off. There are several solutions to provide similar functionality (previous OS restoration programs and web-based systems like SVN), but they have really been unintuitive or difficult to use for tech newbies (or n00bs for the 1337 kids out there).

Apple, if you are reading this, we’ll hook you up with the Flashback code for your faltering, rather lame .Mac service for a few million… We invested a whole heck of a lot of time, money, and energy in the system, but you can give me a call to discuss how much you are willing to compensate us for the original idea and easily-scalable and changeable web-based functionality. The Google guys went and bought the garage where they started working, so it isn’t totally out of the question.

Site5 and a 1981 DeLorean: Site5’s DeLorean Quest

As a member of the Site5 Management Team, I am at liberty to disclose the fact that we are currently looking to buy a fully-functional time traveling DeLorean. If you run across a semi-functional version or one from another year, we may be able to facilitate some kind of web hosting-for-time machine swap.

P.S. If you are a Back to the Future fan, you should definitely check out the Tom Wilson (Biff) “Question” video on YouTube.

P.P.S. Yes, “gigawatts” is the correct spelling of the “jigawatts” in the “1.21 jigawatts” line Christopher Lloyd yells in the movie.

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