I agree, it's too bad the old archives aren't accessible anymore, and no, I'm quite sure Jot doesn't 'own' them. I do remember that the updated 'vines' had HTML coding in the headers that forbade robots (the automated goodies that make search indexes grab updated pages) from crawling the site, and I am guessing that is what is preventing the archived pages from coming up.

Too bad! I too occasionally took a sentimenal journey to some of the oldest pages.