Google Expands Usenet Archive to 20 Years

Paul Boutin writes "The Ghost of Usenet Postings Past has returned to haunt many more of us: Google just announced the expansion of their Usenet archive back to May 3, 1981."Check out the past on Groups.google.com

Comments

Kinda cool

[bryan1945]

Younger folks probably won't find this too interesting as it will be more like history to them rather than us old farts re-living younger days...

I went to the Google link where they have a list of firsts:

First mention of Microsoft; not even the oldest post!
IBM PC.
CDs, in 1982! Shit, now I realize how old I am!
C64, Lisa and Mac, AIDS (a purely homosexual disease?!?!- really weird 'cause I just found an old copy of Discover magazine that had a first mention of AIDS; blew me away due to difference in info we know now)

I love the "WorldWideWeb - Executive Summary" link under the Google link:

A bit of the text-
"
Making a web is as simple as writing a few SGML files which point to your existing data. Making it public involves running the FTP or HTTP daemon, and making at least one link into your web from another. In fact, any file available by anonymous FTP can be immediately linked into a web. The very small start-up effort is designed to allow small contributions. At the other end of the scale, large information providers may provide an HTTP server with full text or keyword indexing.

The WWW model gets over the frustrating incompatibilities of data format between suppliers and reader by allowing negotiation of format between a smart browser and a smart server. This should provide a basis for extension into
multimedia, and allow those who share application standards to make full use of them across the web.

This summary does not describe the many exciting possibilities opened up by the WWW project, such as efficient document caching. the reduction of redundant out-of-date copies, and the use of knowledge daemons. There is more information in the online project documentation, including some background on hypertext and many technical notes.

Try it
"

SGML! Does anyone remember this! "Try it" indeed! Wow, when I thought Usenet was the shit... hehehe!

Lesseee Here!

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

Every post from alt.pave.the.earth
and
alt.culture.electric-midget

This is the stuff that really bears the test of time! Not to metion the great AOL flood of 1995, and the annual rites of September.

What else? 20 years of tjames and kibo.

1.1 Why pave the earth?

There are several advantages of a paved Earth over a non-paved Earth, the only really important one is the ease of driving though. Today roads are narrow, you have to turn, and most governments frown at ground travel over Mach1. With endless blacktop in every direction, there will be no restriction to your movement, and rocket powered hypercars will whiz in all directions. We will be able to amuse ourselves with endless driving at incredible speeds while drinking beer and eating wonderfully juicy burgers.

Can Google be declared historic landmark?

[Anthony Boyd]

Now that Google has a historian's wet-dream of actual writings by actual humans as they experienced historic events, such as the falling of the Berlin wall, what are the odds that someone at some point moves to ensure that this information is preserved? I think Google may be thinking very smart here. Their product could become so important that people might actively try to preserve the company, too.

MIME, PR0N, the good old days.

[Per Abrahamsen]

base64 is part of MIME from the start of the 90'ties, and wasn't really used on Usenet before mid 90'ties. Before that we used uuencode, however there was very little pr0n back then, and low quality. ASCII art comapred favorable to it. You couldn't upload much with 2400 baud modem.

We loved it, though!

some thoughts about it in comparison to ./

[dario_moreno]

like almost everyone else, I typed my "real name"...and found 293 articles dating back
to april 1992. Excepted for my most private
and personal life, you could guess almost
exactly who I am, what is my career, hobbies
and so on... On ./, anonymity and disguise
seem to be more prevalent than on Usenet.

Amazing also to see that before 1994 or so,
there were only educated, polite, informative
people on the face of the earth (and I looked
like a bad-taught puppy in comparison to them).
At this point, with AOLers and non-academics
appearing, something definitely changed.

!mcvax!moskvax!kremvax!chernenko

[wirefarm]

I'm surprised that nobody mentioned this one yet.
Still a favorite of mine:

USSR on Usenet


Of course, now nobody thinks twice when they see a Russian address, but back then it was a big deal.
(To the younger readers: They were the bad guys back then, the "Evil Empire"...)

And now, let's open a flask of Vodka and have a drink on our entry on
this network. So:

NA ZDAROVJE!

Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo

Re:That darn Google...

[aussersterne]

*sucks in air*

No doubt. I just went and had a read at a whole bunch of posts from 10-15 years ago in which I was often a real prick [and strangely enough, in which I seem to have more technical/coding prowess than I have now!?!]. There's nothing like humble pie and complete red-eared embarrassment at three in the morning -- embarrassment first at how one was acting, and second at no longer being able to fully understand technical discussions from one's own teenagehood!

I'm in my late twenties now. I'm an author. My name is out there and is unique. Now, when people type my name into Google, they're going to pull up stuff I posted via free BBSs and tech bars when I was a prick of a teenaged punk-rocker in the '80s who [it would seem] really had a problem or two.

*cringe*

I'm going to go hide my head in the sand for a while, then quickly ink-jet myself a "live and learn" t-shirt.

[Then, as soon as the sun comes up, I'm heading downtown to change my name.]

Re:Good thing?

[Anonymous Coward]

Their list is great to browse through, but there are some real gems off the beaten path as well...

For instance, google points you to: "October, 1991 Linus Torvalds's Linux announcement"

But you can also find a quite interesting, more preliminary announcement from him a few months earlier: "What would you like to see most in minix?"

You can also read about Rob Malda's "Weird Problem while booting...", which is also the first time he calls himself 'Commander Taco' on Usenet. (October 1995)

Post your interesting finds!

Re:That darn Google...

[eXtro]

Being able to remove your own articles from a public forum beyond the "Oh shit! I hope I can cancel that before it propogates" devalues the archive and makes me lose a lot of respect for the people behind google.com. I've posted things I wish I wouldn't have on usenet before. Big deal. There was a bit of embarassment when my dad discovered how to search for my name on groups.google.com, but there were a lot more things that he was proud of. He didn't necessarily understand them, but he could see that they were well received.

If you do things in public then you shouldn't be able to excise them from the publics memory, even if the thing you did was make a spectacular ass of yourself.

First mention of slashdot

[jonearth]

First mention of slashdot

http://groups.google.com/groups?q=slashdot&hl=en &s coring=d&as_drrb=b&as_mind=17&as_minm=1&as_miny=19 97&as_maxd=11&as_maxm=8&as_maxy=1997&rnum=5&selm=5 cr9je%24j2i%40mirrors.cellnet.com

:P

First (and only?) post by Bill Gates

[toast-]

First post (and not even under his own account) can be found here.

Maybe other celebrities can be found in the archive..

Find the article
here

Fascinating -- check it out!

[drix]

This is really fascinating, almost like a time capsule! Can you even imagine a time when everyone in the entire online world didn't know what an emoticon was?! Witness this extraordinary paragraph:

Recently, Scott Fahlman at CMU devised a scheme for annotating one's messages to overcome this problem. If you turn your head sideways to look at the three characters :-) they look sort of like a smiling face. Thus, if someone sends you a message that says "Have you stopped beating your wife?:-)" you know they are joking. If they say "I need to talk to you :-(", be prepared for trouble.

You read these phrases like, "A company called Microsoft," or "A new virus called AIDS"; what a throwback. Very cool!