Slashdot Mirror
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.
Woops. Now look what I've become
you could read the motherfucking article? The answer to your question is on the first page.
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WHO ATE MY BREAKFAST PANTS?
Retrieving this data all the way back from 1981 to 1990 was useless. Who will actually use it? No one, that's who. USENET is dead and is not coming back to life no matter how hard anyone tries. Thats right, not even the likes of Google can resurrect Usenet.
Even the leader of the Open Source Software revolution could not bring back Usenet. Come to think of it Linus Torvalds couldn't even bring his wife back to life on their honeymoon after he showed her his incredably small witherend penis for the first time. See, that's why you shouldn't wait until after marrige to have sex!
The people of today do not care about anything that happened from 1981 to 1990. Some of our worst memories happened in those times and I'll be shit on if some crazy hippies want to bring it back. The people of today want cutting edge technology. That is why Windows XP is doing so well, everyone has a cell phone, and portable music players and computers are in almost every aspect of our lives.
So, if you must have your old USENET articles, then I suppose you can have them, because I am just one person and no matter how hard I try there will always be people like YOU out there.