A bit of a shock to realize that there is no comp.lang.python or net.lang.python in this collection -- because Python was created a decade later in 1991.
2.1M of the oldest Usenet posts are now online for anyone to read
41–50 of 320 posts
Re: 2.1M of the oldest Usenet posts are now online for anyone to read
#42has google stopped destroying things yet? https://lwn.net/Articles/827233/
Killing things is what Google seems to do best (well, first buying, creating, or controlling them and then killing them). They are sort of like the cancer of the Internet.
Re: 2.1M of the oldest Usenet posts are now online for anyone to read
#43Can someone explain Usenet to me? As I understand it, it's not a website. Is it something outside of the WWW? Does it have its own protocol or does it use HTTP? Do you need a dedicated client software for it, similar to IRC? How do/did you register to it? Is it paid? Who hosts it?
Think something like Reddit + Bittorrent. Slight difference -- there would be no main "front page," -- only individual self-hosted hubs that could choose which "subreddits" (newsgroups) they would carry.
How did you get a username? What was its format? Something structured like an email address or just any string?
Re: 2.1M of the oldest Usenet posts are now online for anyone to read
#44Looks like alt got cut off; the alt.tv.* hierarchy isn't there (stops at 10 pages).
i was curious if the alt.binary.* was going to be included. lots of really old software split into RAR files binhexed into large swathes of text.
Which makes me wonder if anti-virus software maintains 25+ years worth of data that might be required to detect a virus from a cracked exe posted in the mid-90s.
Re: 2.1M of the oldest Usenet posts are now online for anyone to read
#45Can someone explain Usenet to me? As I understand it, it's not a website. Is it something outside of the WWW? Does it have its own protocol or does it use HTTP? Do you need a dedicated client software for it, similar to IRC? How do/did you register to it? Is it paid? Who hosts it?
in overly simple terms http+html+url=www, born in 1989.
Re: 2.1M of the oldest Usenet posts are now online for anyone to read
#46I'm a bit surprised that a zip archive of only 2.1 million posts was almost 2GB. I wonder what a treemap of group size looks like.
When you factor in that ZIP compresses by about half, that averages to around 2K per post -- one screenful of text on an 80x25 PC display -- which is unsurprising. It's probably distributed in terms of a few long, informative posts and a long tail of "AOL!" type posts, but still.
There’s probably at least one copy of Kibo’s .signature in there.
Re: 2.1M of the oldest Usenet posts are now online for anyone to read
#47Reminds me of http://www.bash.org/?top
That's IRC though.
Re: 2.1M of the oldest Usenet posts are now online for anyone to read
#48I and a number of people I know are grateful to Henry Spencer for not saving certain groups from the early days. On groups like soc.singles, we were young, lonely, indiscreet and posted using our real names, because it was a private club then (mid-80s).
Oh yes. Same here. Long after realizing Internet never forgets.
Re: 2.1M of the oldest Usenet posts are now online for anyone to read
#49Can someone explain Usenet to me? As I understand it, it's not a website. Is it something outside of the WWW? Does it have its own protocol or does it use HTTP? Do you need a dedicated client software for it, similar to IRC? How do/did you register to it? Is it paid? Who hosts it?
Think something like Reddit + Bittorrent. Slight difference -- there would be no main "front page," -- only individual self-hosted hubs that could choose which "subreddits" (newsgroups) they would carry.
“Reddit + bittorrent” would actually be pretty cool...
Re: 2.1M of the oldest Usenet posts are now online for anyone to read
#50Wasn't this on Deja News that Google bought and integrated into Google groups? How is this archive different?
It really seems to me that archive.org, or some similar organisation, should petition Google to donate their Usenet archive, which they clearly don't care about, to them. Or possibly buy it off them. 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.
I suspect there may be significant overlap between the DejaNews archive and https://archive.org/details/usenethistorical