How Google Saved USENET

Masem writes: "Salon has a well-written article article on the recent revival of much of the USENET archives from '81 to '90 by Google. It mentions that much of the recovery was thanks to years of work in transferring data off 140-some 10" magnetic tapes (~120megs of data) to a more conventional format in order to recover much of the early posts. Even a reference to the previous Slashdot story is made." Update: 01/07 23:52 GMT by T : btempleton adds: "O'Reilly Network asked me to do an article on similar themes and rememberances of USENET history." Thanks, Brad.

Comments

Oooh 10" magnetic tapes!

[TheLocustNMI]

Having had to work with those bastards, I'd have to give extra kudos to Google! There are few places in the United States that can actually read them, and get you the data from them anymore, and they must've been lovingly cared for, with some of them being 20 years old!

I think I speak for everyone when I say "Thank you Google for arming me with the information contained in old USENet posts to bring up embarassing teenage posts to my friends!"

Re:Oooh 10" magnetic tapes!

[RadioheadKid]

Actually, Google didn't do much, if any of the magnetic tape work, it was Bruce Jones, a grad student who transferred 107 tapes in two weeks and then David Wiseman did the rest over the next ten years. Google just downloaded them from him...

Re:Just think...

[ideut]

Reading your first link, it's amusing to see that even ten years ago there were a lot of ridiculous IP shenanigans. Such as

"Ashton-Tate is once again pushing its case for a copyright on the programming language used in DBase. ".

And the numerous silly patents, such as

'Emacs is threatened by IBM patent number 4,674,040 which covers "cut and paste between files" in a text editor. Many Emacs features are threatened by patent number 4,458,311, which covers "text and numeric processing on same screen." Patent 4,398,249 covering the general spreadsheet technique known as "natural order recalc" stops us from using it in GNU '

O'Reilly Network article on the same theme

[btempleton]

This is a popular theme this month, with no surprises. O'Reilly Network also asked me to do an article on the history of USENET and things discovered in the archives. At the same time I also did an article on the history of some popular net terms like spam and net surfing.

You can read the article I wrote on the O'Reilly site

Re:That little?

[btempleton]

There were no binaries in the early days. First there were the net.sources groups where you would find new Unix programs, notably the lastest updates of USENET software.

Binaries groups showed up a bit later, mostly after the great renaming, mostly for IBM PC Shareware and freeware binaries. No Warez or photos, not until a lot later.