2.1M of the oldest Usenet posts are now online for anyone to read

hmm... here's a taste of it:

https://slashdot.org/story/00/08/27/1439247/usenet-archive-f...

EDIT:

Great Renaming: n.

The flag day in 1987 on which all of the non-local groups on the Usenet had their names changed from the net.- format to the current multiple-hierarchies scheme. Used esp. in discussing the history of newsgroup names. “The oldest sources group is comp.sources.misc; before the Great Renaming, it was net.sources.” There is a Great Renaming FAQ on the Web.

https://www.catb.org/jargon/html/G/Great-Renaming.html

https://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/news/drum-and-drummer-643105...

This guy was apparently a genius drummer as a young man -- jammed with Jaco Pastorius, and a friend of John Medeski.

Then a bodybuilder, steroid user (when it was legal), convicted felon, a sufferer of chronic illness, and epic Usenet flamewar participant.

And deceased since 2012, but people still flame him on Usenet.

https://www.drumforum.org/threads/r-i-p-rob-schuh.73509/

And on top of it he also made drums. I remember that from the newsgroup:

https://rec.music.makers.percussion.narkive.com/RqlLNCp4/pro...

I remember the flames but about drums and steroids, but I had no idea back then ...

Does anybody remember who this is? I can’t find him, despite my efforts searching for what I just described.

For an archive this is a big no-no. Respect the source material!

Otherwise, thank you for the time spent doing this.

Did you find additional utzoo material beyond what was already on archive.org in tarballs?

I do have one question. Those tapes...how old were they? Were they contemporary to the postings? (bonus question: if so wow, but under what justification?. tapes were expensive right and nobody valued archiving at the time (except maybe this guy)?) this individual you got the tapes from meticulously copy onto new media and all the overhead that entails?

Today I make personal backups of things I want to keep, whether local files or web snippets and burn 'em to a DVD , blu-ray, or optical disk of some kind with the justification of 'can't ransomware WORM media'.

However, I don't do the internet archiving guru stuff of '3 copies, 2 mediums, 1 routine' (or something like that) so in a sense my backups are cruising for a bruising in the case that optical disks could go bad, hard drives could die (these I do migrate to new media when I get around to it, CDs I just read and burn to a fresh one), house could burn down, etc.

Partially looking to see if I can get justification for my backup slovenliness ;)

I've frankly never trusted them as a steward for this and I'm glad to see someone stepping in.

Do you have any plans to team up with the Internet Archive on this?

How do you handle cross posting?

On one hand it’s nice that we can see all this old data. On the other hand, as far as I remember in the 90s you typically subscribed to a newsgroup and only then got recent posts. So the expectations was a limited life time of the post. Of course it would still be stored in thousands of readers.

Obviously the copyright of each post is with the author. You just assume that you have a right to redistribute.

I’m also happy if I get a pointer elsewhere if you have an url.

Fatal error: Uncaught Error: Call to a member function real_escape_string() on null in /var/www/html/usenetarchives.com/3.vars.php:80 Stack trace: #0 /var/www/html/usenetarchives.com/1.header.php(190): include() #1 /var/www/html/usenetarchives.com/view.php(22): include_once('/var/www/html/u...') #2 {main} thrown in /var/www/html/usenetarchives.com/3.vars.php on line 80

Pretty consistently.

As it exists right now, there are some glaring omissions. I would imagine that showing authors in the search results next to the titles would not be prohibitively difficult.

Proper threading of posts would probably be considerably harder, but would provide immense value IMHO.

DMCA took this incredible resource off line. Please don’t let this happen again, as even archive.org found it easier to destroy it all than to fight Marty.

Plus it allows all us little people build fun things with it, like my altavista based search of utzoo:

altavista.superglobalmegacorp.com

Thanks

  ihnp4!{cithep,wlbr!callan}!tim

ihnp4 was very well connected, so it was reasonable for me to expect that you could find a way to get the email to it.

The rest of my email address is saying that ihnp4 should deliver the mail to cithep (Caltech High Energy Physics) or wlbr (a machine at the Westlake Village, CA offices of Bunker Ramo). If it goes to wlbr, wlbr should send it to callan (a machine at Callan Data Systems). I had accounts on cithep and callan, both with user name tim.

You didn't have to start at ihnp4, of course. As long as you could find a way to get it to one of {ihnp4, cithep, wlbr, callan} you could get it to me.

Periodically there was a posting on Usenet giving a list of machines that would publicly relay mail and their interconnections. (I want to say this was monthly and in net.general, but I'm not sure).

Given that and a list of machines that your site connected to, you could find a path from your site to me. Let's say you were in Boston, and you knew your company exchanged mail with decvax (a machine at Digital Equipment Corporation). You could see from the connection list that decvax connected to trwrb (a machine at TRW Redondo Beach, CA, I believe), and trwrb connected to wlbr, so from your machine the email address decvax!trwrb!wlbr!callan!tim would work to reach me.

The basic concept is simply copying and forwarding email-like messages, grouped into a hierarchical set of newsgroup feeds. A host would subscribe to other hosts, and would allow other hosts to subscribe to their own feeds. And then just push/pull this through the network.

Originally, this was done all with shell scripts dialing up remote hosts by modem and copying compressed datasets nightly. This developed into a full suite of protocols called UUCP. Later, Internet protocols like the Network News Transfer Protocol started carrying some, then all, of the traffic.

In principle, it is unregistered, unpaid, and decentralized. You start exchanging with someone else who has the newsgroups you want to send and receive.

In practice, both in the past and now, you subscribe, usually commercially, to one of the services with the bandwidth and storage to host a reasonable portion of Usenet. ISPs often provided NNTP Usenet service into the early 2000s, along with SMTP/POP for email.

One can dial into your ISP, sync News (fetch new messages in groups one is subscribed to and send messages) and then go offline and read/answer the messages without paying per minute and without blocking ports for other dial-in customers.

This also worked between different news servers in distinct networks with unreliable connections.

For the how paid: In some regions it was part of the things a "good" ISP had to offer their clients. Also back in the days™ large parts of the internet was run on machines in some university labs.

Messages were transferred overnight by copying the latest changes between each uni, you could post to the use group of choice using a usenet client. I was very excited to have access to it at the time, it was rare to have a connection outside of a uni.

There were source code feeds to where you could download the latest sources and try to compile them yourself, I remember fiddling with things like flex and bison.

It was full nerd - pretty well everyone was an academic, student or worked at a uni or research lab, you'd have contact in almost real time with anyone - this was a new thing.

You'd interface with it using a glass tty - I had a vt52 which connected to a Sun 3 box, which was our development computer. I remember getting a 300 baud modem and connecting to it at night from home with my PC, or maybe it was my amstrad still, PC's were very expensive still. It was a fun time.

Edit: just remembered we only had one dial in modem to the uni, and I'd use it to dial in from home, I remember we used to fight over access to it - eventually they got a second one because the sys admin was sick of not being able to get access to the network at night. They to were very expensive, I think they were 2400 or maybe even 4800 bps - a crazy speed then.

What it was is basically a massive collection of discussion groups, organised hierarchically, hosted on local machines that exchanged these messages with other machines. There was a variety of newsreader programs available that you could use to read and post messages on these discussion groups.

Not every usenet host supports every group. There were a couple of top-level hierarchies, like rec.* for everything recreational, like hobbies and games (I was an avid reader of the rec.games.frp.* newsgroups, which were about roleplaying games); sci.* for everything science, comp.* for everything computer related (some of which was admittedly also recreational). There was also the alt.* hierarchy where literally anything goes. Many hosts only supported a limited selection of the alt.* newsgroups.

You'd post under your own email address, and most newsreaders also supported emailing people directly instead of responding in the group.

I believe there was a big revamp at the end of the 1980s where everything about usenet got changed. I only know the situation from after that reorganisation.

https://archive.org/details/matrixcomputerne0000quar/mode/2u...

I lifted a copy off a friend who was thinning his book herd a decade or so back. The first edition, published in 1990, predates the commercial Internet, World Wide Web, Linux, and all of what's transpired since, though the introduction pressages much by noting the role of existing networks in the the then-fresh events of April 15 – June 4, 1989, known as the six-four incident, and culminating in the Tiananmen Square Massacre.

The book has a 15 page section describing Usenet, including user and traffic statistics from 1979--1988, mostly compiled by Gene Spafford and Brian Reid. Usenet is only one of numerous conferencing systems covered, others being BITNET, UUCP, FidoNET, VNET, and EASYnet

For April, 1988: 381 newsgroups, 57,979 messages, 130.949 MB, 4,152--7,810 hosts (depending on who counted and how), and an estimated 141,000 readers (people) from a total online population of 880,000.

Larry Wall, working at JPL, is named ... as the author of rn.

Much of the book, though, simply discusses the many many individual computer networks. The notion of a single global end-to-end interconnected inter-network was still very much a novelty.

In one section, the fact that the principle public interconnect between North America and Europe was a single 9600 Baud link is mentioned....

Originally, Usenet used UUCP for transport; later on NNTP was defined so Usenet could be shared via TCP/IP. In the early days, only DARPA contractors (which included many university computer science departments) could be on the Internet; second-class citizens could use UUCP and modems.

In the early there were only a few dozen to few hundred computers, mainly in universities and computer companies. You list all the networked computers in a single file called /etc/hosts.

In the late 1980s universal protocols and funding from Senator Al Gores 1991 Information Superhighway legislation allowed the computers anywhere in the world to interconnect.

My usenet email address from 1976 still works.

An NNTP server had a list of discussion forums: clients connected and got the list, and the user could selectively subscribe to the one's they were interested in. The client would keep track of which messages were read, and so when new ones were posted you'd only see new messages by default.

Each NNTP server could talk to other NNTP servers. They would exchange a list of forums each had, and then the articles had in each forum. Each article/post had a unique ID (basically like the Message-ID in e-mails), and so each could request articles from the other that they did not already have. New messages could be posted to either server and they would 'cross pollinate' (multi-master basically).

Each NNTP server could technically talk to multiple other NNTP servers, so cross-pollination could be very wide, but in the early days with low-kbps modems and expensive long distance, there was a lot of local hierarchical hubs.

There were a few key hubs that had fancy long-distance T1 and such that could transfer across continents and oceans as a bit of a service for the community.

One would "post" a message and periodically one or more systems would poll your system. Either over the ARPAnet or via an actual modem. It would fetch all of the posts that had been created on that system and add them to its list of new posts, and it would send you all of the posts you hadn't yet seen.

In a directory on your system would be all of the posts from everyone on Usenet for all of the groups you cared to "follow."

Back in the 80's I could read everything posted in a couple of hours in the morning. :-) That changed quickly.

Slight difference -- there would be no main "front page," -- only individual self-hosted hubs that could choose which "subreddits" (newsgroups) they would carry.

https://usenetarchives.com/groups.php?c=utzoo

Someone should do this properly. Like the ArchiveTeam guys.

Gen Z, woooooo. Woo.

I'm doomed.

You could use the same system to get software: I eventually got an entire GNU development system for my Atari ST from umich via archie. Usenet would have index updates broadcast so you knew when to download new files.

Also, the clarity of those Spectrum 512 files. You could almost see the texture of the skin.

Bit unreasonable to complain that Google is evil because they don't want to keep an archive of Usenet when the only reason this is an issue is because nobody else wanted to do that either. Every organization which ran an NNTP server had a copy of all messages because Usenet is decentralised, every single one could have kept an archive and didn't, it's not like websites where nobody but the webserver host has full access.

Not gonna go as far as saying "it cannot be evil to do what everyone else does", but if there is only one remaining archive on the planet and you desperately value it ... why are you shitting on the company which owns it?

When it comes to usenet though...

https://www.usenetarchives.com/threads.php?id=comp.lang.smal...

Was really suprised to see this, a page an a half of posts and healthy replies from just this last month. I really wonder what type of people still hang out there.

It's a long shot since it would require Google to actually do something with a dataset they clearly don't care about, but they could get some good corporate PR points almost for free.

It's nice that this person/org is hosting these, but I'd feel more comfortable if archive.org (and perhaps another org or two) mirrored them as well. History shouldn't be dependent on some random person/org paying to host them. I thought things would be safe with Google and I was wrong. I'm definitely less confident that usenetarchives.com will be around forever.

[0] https://lwn.net/Articles/827233/

The main consequence of that flooding, disrupting and destroying of newsgroups is people moved on to the shiny social media sites, and Usenet was effectively killed off.

Once you posted something, you had no real control over it being retained and archived. There was a message header you could set ("X-No-Archive: yes" IIRC), but it could not really be enforced.

reddit is owned by someone. it is censored periodically. it is monetized.

usenet was built up in a more grassroots peer-to-peer way.