Back in time: OldSF delves into city history

Fancy checking out San Francisco as it was in the 1850s? That's what two ingenious coders have made possible, using archive photographs and an interactive map.

The OldSF project (weblink: oldsf.org) provides what its creators call "an alternative way of browsing the San Francisco Public Library's incredible San Francisco Historical Photograph Collection."

In practice, it looks a bit like Google Maps taken back to the mid-nineteenth century.

With photographs spanning a 150-year period from 1850 to 2000, software developers Dan Vanderkam and Raven Keller assembled the historical experience using upwards of 13,000 images from the SFPL, observes Business Insider.

Vanderkam had previously built OldNYC.org, which has since become an app for iOS.