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Usenet rewind archive search engine

usenet-rewind.com

41–50 of 52 posts

Re: Usenet rewind archive search engine

#41

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.

And then axed Google Groups and refused to release the data. Typical Google.

you can bet any spicey stuff went into your dossier, too

Re: Usenet rewind archive search engine

#42
post #4

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) 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. 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.

I spent a bit of time haranguing Henry Spencer about why plywood was the perfect material to make satellites out of, in sci.space. I am not a materials scientist or a rocket scientist, and from memory he was the USENET admin at U Toronto department of Zoology, somehow uplifted to being the foremost space/rocketry name on USENET news. That pretty much sums up the zeitgeist.

Re: Usenet rewind archive search engine

#43
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do we actually have a culture of cancelling people for the things they wrote when they were 12?

No, and we don't really have a culture of cancelling things for people they say now, either, when it comes down to it because if that were true, Trump would not be president given his long history of [waves hands], a large number of Republican politicians would also be out of work, etc.

So what is it that drives such phrases into common parlance as a description of the apparently-fictitious culture of rote cancellation, might one suppose?

I might suggest that "projection" is a primary motivator, although I work to avoid projecting on my own time.

(Edit: To disambiguate without vagueness: When some fucking party or other is talking about "cancel culture," they usually seem, to me, to be projecting about their own fucking party's fucking ugly policies and tactics.

And in a sane and pure world, I'd like to wish that they'd be recognized as being fucking scumbags for behaving in this way.

But it is my observation that we do not always live in a sane and pure world.)

Re: Usenet rewind archive search engine

#44

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 bootstrap…

> 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

Re: Usenet rewind archive search engine

#45

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.

> 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.

Well done.

Re: Usenet rewind archive search engine

#46
post #5

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. S…

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.org

Newsgrouper is banned in UK for "safety concerns"

Re: Usenet rewind archive search engine

#47
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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. (Actually, I wonder if the Prodigy forums got archived...)

Those were semi private no ? I would guess not. Although maybe there's an old server sitting in someone's garage with the info

Re: Usenet rewind archive search engine

#48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. (Actually, I wonder if the Prodigy forums got archived...)

Those were semi private no ? I would guess not. Although maybe there's an old server sitting in someone's garage with the info

I think this is the best we've got - but seems moribund. Relied on finding people's old C:\PRODIGY directories and finding what was cached

https://www.prodigyreloaded.com/

Re: Usenet rewind archive search engine

#49
post #5

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. S…

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.org

I run newsgrouper.org as a hobby project. My architecture cannot support searching within article text, only by author, subject and/or date within one group at a time (or the set of groups you have subscribed to). Usenet-Rewind does support full-text search.

Re: Usenet rewind archive search engine

#50
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.org

Newsgrouper is banned in UK for "safety concerns"

Newsgrouper is my site. It's not literally "banned", but after spending quite a bit of time studying the Online Safety Act and Ofcom's guidance, I concluded that it was just not practical to comply with its far-reaching requirements, and since I am in the UK I can't risk ignoring UK law.
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