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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
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.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
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.
My Greasemonkey scripts for Digg &
like almost everyone else, I typed my "real name"...and found 293 articles dating back ./, anonymity and disguise
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
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.
Google passes Turing test : see my journal
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
-- My Weblog.
*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.]
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
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.
Chris Kuivenhoven is a thief, beware
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