Just found some cool old stuff thanks to this:<p>1996-01-17: first post! a reply to a thread in alt.music.bjork<p>1996-03-11: first mention of my website/homepage<p>No links to avoid my own embarrassment.
Ah this has reminded me of dejanews.com the usenet archive. Before the days of Stack Overflow that was absolute gold for looking up an error message or code issue.<p>If I remember rightly Google bought the data when they shutdown and incorporated it into Google Groups.
Logistically, these collections usually exclude alt.binaries traffic entirely. I often wonder if there are enough obsessive collectors out there to piece together an archive from ancient tapes and hard drives.
Oh my god this is a lifesaver. Just last week I was using Google Groups to search for old Usenet posts about the Commodore 64 and the Mimic Spartan, and I was getting "too many requests" errors 4 out of 5 times clicking a result. Happened on VPN+incognito, and in a separate browser. Just searched for what I was looking for in Rewind and immediately found the posts and even some I never saw in Google Groups results. So glad all of this is archived in multiple, non Google places
Grabbed the UTZOO tapes off archive.org a while back, ~2GB compressed for 1981-1991, and recoll indexed the whole thing in an afternoon.
If you go local, notmuch beat recoll for me on the mbox split, ~2M messages indexed in about 40 min on a cheap SSD.
Selfishly, I hate these things. No one in the 1980s and early 1990s expected the internet to become what it did. I discovered it as a dumb teenager and posted some frankly idiotic stuff. I also put my real address and phone number in the signature, because that's how you rolled back then, the entire internet was like 10 nerds.<p>Now, 35 years later, a lot of other stuff has mercifully decayed, but people keep bootstrapping these Usenet archives as pet projects every year, and there's never an option to opt out. Today, agents make it easier than ever to build a dossier on anyone you don't like, so this data is bound to cause some harm. And I guess when I die, the best-preserved memory of me that my grandchildren and grand-grandchildren will be able to pull up will be snarky posts from a 15-year-old on some unix-related discussion group.<p>Yeah, I know there's a bunch of posts there that are of genuine historical interest. But I'm just not a fan and I don't mind burning karma to speak my mind.
Same. It’s hard to understand today, but in a world where search engines weren’t really a thing and almost no one knew what the internet was, the concept of “public” was quite different.<p>Yes, I should have known better in my teenage years about it. And also yes there was no reason for me to expect that everything I wrote would be easily available to some AI panopticon 30-40 years later
My view is the complete opposite. In the 90s I thought the digital revolution and the internet will be so groundbreaking that everything connected to it will be remembered. Moreover storage seemed so cheap, why would we ever want to delete anything. The internet never forgets.<p>Turns out storage wasn't free and the the following generations did not have the same appreciation for everything 80s and 90s, so much of it is lost forever.
I can imagine you’d be embarrassed, I did stupid stuff too, but unless you’re running for Congress you should just say “I was a stupid teenager” and let it wash. Anyone fair minded will dismiss it.
Man, I sure knew 35 years ago that whatever I shared in public was.... public. :)<p>And some of it still is public from way back then -- including dumb and ugly comments, stupid flamewars, teenager stuff, and phone numbers. It doesn't bother me.<p>I don't feel remorseful for having once been a kid and doing some of the dumb things that kids sometimes feel inclined to do, and those landline telephone numbers stopped being relevant to me decades ago.
Public or not 1991 was a very, very, very different time. The idea that some dumb stuff I posted would still be around in 30+ years would have been crazy.<p>(Actually, I wonder if the Prodigy forums got archived...)
35 years ago we didn’t have the cultural precedent/zeitgeist of getting cancelled for some stupid shit you wrote on a message board in 1991 so we were less guarded with our opinions.
It's nice that usenet still exists today, although if not mainly for warez.<p>It's sad that it's now powered by only four usenet backbones.
The most prolific self-references (to myself that is) I found were UUCP maps updates because I ran a node which was in the centrally coordinated catalog (iirc it drove honey-danber to convert a!b!c paths to user@c so you didn't have to hand-route)<p>The second-most prolific self references were blovating across all and any groups I felt like. Nothing has changed.
> The second-most prolific self references were blovating across all and any groups I felt like. Nothing has changed.<p>I can take the moral high ground here because my bloviating was at least in relevant groups. But still, bloody hell, younger me was (mostly) an idiot.
A similar one from earlier in the year:<p><i>Usenet Archives</i><p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47655905">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47655905</a>