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- Hacker News
- Grabbed the UTZOO tapes off archive.org a while back, ~2GB compressed for 1981-1991, and recoll indexed the whole thing in an afternoon.by sparrowidle
- Where is the source of all these Usenet services? I thought people just stopped mirroring when Google groups got so prolific? I wonder how big all of this is minus the *.binariesby alfiedotwtf
- 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.
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.
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.
by matherial - Just found some cool old stuff thanks to this:
1996-01-17: first post! a reply to a thread in alt.music.bjork
1996-03-11: first mention of my website/homepage
No links to avoid my own embarrassment.
by msephton - 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 placesby rfarley04
- 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.
If I remember rightly Google bought the data when they shutdown and incorporated it into Google Groups.
by kingrolo - You can visit only 25 pages on the website with a free account, that's a bit too limiting. I'd suggest limiting the number of searches maybe but not the pagination over the results.
I got curious again to find my old posts and figured I could download and grep the mbox files from Internet Archive instead.
by vinc - A similar one from earlier in the year:
Usenet Archives