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.
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 places
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
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.
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.
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
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.
The current social zeitgeist is that one is permanently responsible for everything they ever said, even has a child. All nuance is gone. People are looking for a reason to make someone the enemy, and if you're the enemy, violence is acceptable now. I wish it weren't like this, but it is, so I can understand why people want to stay out of the crosshairs.
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.
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.
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...)
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.
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.
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.
Very cool. I've been working on something similar. My cutoff date is 1994 as Usenet changes substantially in nature then.
May I ask how you collected the data? Usenet is not fully archived anywhere. No one has a complete set.
I am aware of:
* the NewNews disc series on CD from '91 - '93 which has a substantial text feed for the big groups during that era (most of these are on IA.org, but some are not!)
* The Dejanews archives via Google up to c. 2013. Also up on IA.org These are lacking large amounts of early posts, and are highly spotty before about 1994 (when Dejanews started).
I got so desperate as to go scanning zip and tar files on old ftp sites for anything with a Usenet header. That scored a few hundred thousand articles mostly from the 90s.
The big spike in the early 90s is from those CDs archives in the months where I had access. It gives an idea for how limited those Giganews/Google and other surviving archives are.
I figure less than 50% early text Usenet survives, unless someone has vast hordes of data that they are not disclosing.
As for the Utzoo archives - they're legally encumbered and some of the posters sue anyone who hosts them. (They're not available from the IA - taken down.)
You have a takedown page but the legal and copyright issues were one of the main back-burner items keeping me from making my archive live. Some of the more eccentric Usenet personalities are still alive.
Same with privacy issues. I notice you have full text search. I was reluctant to do that for privacy reasons.
I discovered very early on how to index by email but that felt quite invasive. I took that out, and built a graph of all the X-refs: which turned out to be more interesting (walking the discussion trees) and somewhat more privacy preserving in that you can explore but not search.
I was also thinking of an AI-based content warning filter, because I have a "random post" button and it is sometimes wild what that lands on.
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.
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 *.binaries
I got curious again to find my old posts and figured I could download and grep the mbox files from Internet Archive instead.
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.
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.
If I remember rightly Google bought the data when they shutdown and incorporated it into Google Groups.
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.
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
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.
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.
(Actually, I wonder if the Prodigy forums got archived...)
I haven't checked it out myself but I've heard that some posts were removed from this magnet.
Usenet Archives
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47655905
May I ask how you collected the data? Usenet is not fully archived anywhere. No one has a complete set.
I am aware of:
* the NewNews disc series on CD from '91 - '93 which has a substantial text feed for the big groups during that era (most of these are on IA.org, but some are not!)
* The Dejanews archives via Google up to c. 2013. Also up on IA.org These are lacking large amounts of early posts, and are highly spotty before about 1994 (when Dejanews started).
* The Utzoo tapes over at https://archive.org/details/utzoo-wiseman-usenet-archive cover a part of '81 - '91 but only from one host. "Far parts" of Usenet over in Japan or Europe are barely covered.
* Some groups preserve per-newsgroup histories scattered all over and tending to drop offline over the years
* fj.* is well-archived but it's Japanese
The chart speaks for itself I think as to coverage: https://i.imgur.com/WCQm4od.png
I got so desperate as to go scanning zip and tar files on old ftp sites for anything with a Usenet header. That scored a few hundred thousand articles mostly from the 90s.
The big spike in the early 90s is from those CDs archives in the months where I had access. It gives an idea for how limited those Giganews/Google and other surviving archives are.
I figure less than 50% early text Usenet survives, unless someone has vast hordes of data that they are not disclosing.
As for the Utzoo archives - they're legally encumbered and some of the posters sue anyone who hosts them. (They're not available from the IA - taken down.)
You have a takedown page but the legal and copyright issues were one of the main back-burner items keeping me from making my archive live. Some of the more eccentric Usenet personalities are still alive.
Same with privacy issues. I notice you have full text search. I was reluctant to do that for privacy reasons.
I discovered very early on how to index by email but that felt quite invasive. I took that out, and built a graph of all the X-refs: which turned out to be more interesting (walking the discussion trees) and somewhat more privacy preserving in that you can explore but not search.
I was also thinking of an AI-based content warning filter, because I have a "random post" button and it is sometimes wild what that lands on.
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.
It's sad that it's now powered by only four usenet backbones.