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- Hacker News
- 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.by fros1y
- If you go local, notmuch beat recoll for me on the mbox split, ~2M messages indexed in about 40 min on a cheap SSD.by hn1rig3rak
- 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
- Are those still up? no brainer to have for anyone serious.by alchemist1e9
- It's nice that usenet still exists today, although if not mainly for warez.
It's sad that it's now powered by only four usenet backbones.
by doublerabbit - 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 - Wild that I put my street address in some of my posts. Those were different times indeed.by qingcharles
- > 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
Just make a bunch of really good posts and put your name on them
by jrflowers - 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.
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.
by weinzierl - Man, I sure knew 35 years ago that whatever I shared in public was.... public. :)
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.
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.
by ssl-3 - 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.
- 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.
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
by jghn - 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
- 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 - Upvoting for visibility ;)by TehCorwiz
- > No links to avoid my own embarrassment.
There are only 7 posts in alt.music.bjork on the first date, and one of them has your name on it. There's 1 post with your name on the second date, and it gives a website. The earliest wayback entry for that website redirects to another wayback location that exists.
- 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
- Not to be a party pooper but this is a paid service. I am sure there are reasons to pay but I bet their archive is the same as https://usenet.blueworldhosting.com which is free. A free web frontend can be found at https://newsgrouper.orgby imprint5
- 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 - by cstadler1869
- And then axed Google Groups and refused to release the data. Typical Google.by doublerabbit
- A similar one from earlier in the year:
Usenet Archives
- I'm trying to figure out which one has more messagesby myth_drannon
- 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