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Google's 20-Year Usenet Timeline
theRG writes "Google just released its 20-Year Usenet Timeline. Among the highlights: First Mac rumor, first 'me too' post, Tim Berners-Lee's announcement of the Web, and Linus' announcement of Linux."
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first post! I probably failed it
Monstar L
From Linus' announcement:
I can (well, almost) hear you asking yourselves "why?". Hurd will be out in a year (or two, or next month, who knows), and I've already got minix.
The Hurd. Beautiful.
Heh, this was reported on Slashdot over ago...
Expect a call from Apple Legal. Steve doesn't like having his surprises ruined.
"Hurd will be out in a year or two" - Linus
It cracks me up every time.
Someone hunt down and kill that "Me too" guy with AOL CDs.
utilities/library functions for minix. If your efforts are freely
distributable (under copyright or even public domain), I'd like to hear
from you, so I can add them to the system. I'm using Earl Chews estdio
right now (thanks for a nice and working system Earl), and similar works
will be very wellcome. Your (C)'s will of course be left intact. Drop me
a line if you are willing to let me use your code.
It's no accident that Linux was such an pleasant project to hack on way back when, Linus is just such a humble and polite person. He still is today. What ever happened to that? These days you're lucky to get a reply to an email when offering to contribute code to an open source project, let alone someone actually thanking you for going to the effort of making something for others to enjoy.
How we know is more important than what we know.
I'm particularly fond of their
current map of usenet done with ascii art.
I'll give $5.00 to the first person to provide an updated ascii art usenet map.
It's been over 3 years since this page went up!
From the linked page:
11 Dec 2001 Google offers 20-year Usenet Archive
From the first mention of "Return of the Jedi":
I can't really imagine waiting until 1997 to see all nine parts of the Star Wars series.
How about waiting until 2005 to see the first six?
and,
Bill Gates posted to net.micro on July 22, 1983 from microsoft.uucp (from the account of Gordon Letwin, although he signs it as himself) talking about his crazy days at Harvard where he learned to do PEEKs and POKEs (cool, If I was using my Commodore-64 right now I'd do a POKE 53281,6 in honor of Bill)
You can find it here
I'm basing that on several factors. Checking the Alexa rankings over the past few months, Google Groups have gone from about 7% of all Google users down to 1% as of a few moments ago. Granted, Alexa is not the most accurate measurement of a site, but it does give some indications as to overall popularity.
Some of their own statistics show that most groups have low activity: Group-Society Activity High (167) Low (6712) Medium (137)
All of the other groups show low activity as the largest numbers. They simply do not have the eyeballs hitting the groups.
They do not show Adsense ads in groups, at least none that I've found. It's all paid for by ad revenue from other Google areas.
The groups that are not moderated have degenerated into ad spam fests, driving off people interested in those groups topics.
I think that when Alexa shows less than 1% of users, Google will decide it's no longer worth keeping.
I do agree with you that Usenet can be useful for finding answers, I use a combination of Google search and Groups search. I still think Google will rethink Groups, either dumping it, or correcting the problems. (I'm leaning toward them dumping it).
Pete Carr Owner Chatmag.com
I'll try and post news here from time to time if it
seems like it might interest people - for instance, it looks as if the HHGG
movie is finally coming after the shelf after 10 years.
This post was made in 1993.
The ______ Agenda
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
"Good grief!" said I. "What happens in January of 1980?" She turned pale and admitted she had considered that before but managed to put it out of her mind. "So why not go ahead and fix it now?" I asked.
She pointed out that fixing it would require expanding the demand deposit master record format, a mammoth undertaking. About a billion COBOL programs would have to be recompiled. At this shop we were still on cards and a rush compile took about a week. "You want to do that?" she inquired. This time I turned pale. We onsidered our options, knowing that one or the other of us would be called upon to fix the problem. And you know what we did?
First, I modified the daily demand deposit program with code that checked for the date and about mid-1979 started printed warnings on the console of what would happen come new year. Then the systems analyst and I got new jobs. This is known as stepwise interactive development."