Old Usenet posts on-line again

Decades before Twitter threads, Reddit forums, or Facebook groups, there was Usenet: an early-internet, pre-Web discussion system where one could start and join conversations much like today’s message boards. It was launched in 1980. On Usenet, people talked about everything. And there were many interesting discussions and technical details posted.

Old 80s Usenet content published on-line again!

Most of this is from before my time in Usenet. I started using BBSs in the late 80s and Usenet in 1989.

Interesting coincidence that just two months ago I found some old 3.3″ ‘floppy disks’ from early 1990′s with saved Usenet material that seemed relevant of that time. Thought of looking what was in there some day with USB floppy drive… but maybe the data is already saved.

I was pretty active on Usenet on 90s and early 2000. I even maintained (and still host) two Usenet group FAQs: sfnet.harrastus.audio+video usein kysytyt kysymykset (FAQ) and sfnet.harrastus.elektroniikka usein kysytyt kysymykset. I also had some of my own Usenet mini archive of some interesting posts. Around 2009 my interest in Usenet groups had faded because I felt their usefulness had faded.

Vice reports:

2.1 Million of the Oldest Internet Posts Are Now Online for Anyone to Read
https://www.vice.com/en/article/pky7km/usenet-archive-utzoo-online

Jozef Jarosciak just put millions of early Usenet posts on a browsable archive for the first time.

Around 2.1 million posts from between February 1981 and June 1991 from Henry Spencer’s UTZOO NetNews Archive are archived at the Usenet Archive for anyone to browse at
https://www.usenetarchives.com/groups.php?c=utzoo&p=0

This latest archive-dump is part of an even larger project by Jarosciak. He launched the Usenet Archive site last month, as a way to host groups in a way that’d be independent of Google Groups, which also holds archives of newsgroups like Usenet. It’s currently archiving 317 million posts in 10,000 unique Usenet newsgroups.

The site at https://UsenetArchives.com id free of charge and free of advertising access to archives of BIG-8 and other Usenet text newsgroups.