From: gry...@osu.edu (T. Gryn)
Subject: Old USENET / Netnews (pre-Dejanews) archives: discussion
Date: 1999/08/31
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For those interested in searching past USENET posts, IMHO
DejaNews is an invaluable resource. Considering the large
number of posts made per day, that any one company can
archive so much material, then make it searchable, is a rather amazing
accomplishment. It would be a serious loss to the online
community if DejaNews should ever disappear, or their
database be lost.
Having said that...
Up until their recent reorganization, DejaNews appeared to
also be interested in recovering the USENET posts made
prior to DN's inception (mid-'95). Unfortunately, based on their
current online FAQs, it appears that this effort has been
discontinued.
In my personal research, I've come across only two WWW sites
which really begin to address this need:
---
http://communication.ucsd.edu/A-News/
(USENET OldNews Archive; has all USENET posts from May '81
to May '82)
http://starbase.neosoft.com/~claird/news.lists/newsgroup_archives.html
(document written by Cameron Laird in '94, lists the USENET archives
which existed at that time.)
----
And that's it. From searching in DejaNews for past discussions
of this topic, it appears that prior to DejaNews, SIMTEL was selling
CDROMs of USENET post collections, though it does not appear that
any attempt to collect these CDs has been made. How many
of these CDROMs are in private hands is anyone's guess.
A number of the archives which Mr. Laird lists have disappeared.
My concern is that, the longer this material goes uncollected,
it will be harder and harder to reclaim it in any usable form.
In addition to it's value to future digital archeologists, there's
the collected thoughts of thousands, if not tens of thousands,
of individuals which are encompassed in these posts.
It just seems a terrible waste for them to be lost. Yes, many
of them weren't particularly memorable, but there's a lot there
that was. It's also a history of the development of the Internet,
through the online discussions of USENET posters.
In addition to soliciting other's thoughts on this issue,
I have these specific questions. Any help with them
would be appreciated!
(1) Has DejaNews abandoned their efforts to recover pre-1995
USENET posts? If so, did they succeed in recovering any
archival material prior to this discontinuation, and if yes, what
is the extent of what they have?
For example, the webmaster of the A-News archive
emailed me that he has the USENET posts from the end of
May '81 to some time in '85, and he has passed them along
to DejaNews several years ago, but hasn't heard anything
back from them. He doesn't have the resources to organize
or post them on the WWW or in FTP; the size of his archive
is around 12-14 GB.
(2) Has there been any effort beyond DejaNews' to collect
pre-1995 USENET material, by anyone? I'm not sure if the
Internet Archive is conducting anything like this or not...
Mainly, though, I'm curious to see if anyone else is concerned
that the olde posts are basically being lost to time, and if anything
has (or can) be done about it.
Thanks for your time.
Tom Gryn..............gry...@osu.edu
P.S. Please excuse the cross-posting, but I couldn't find a newsgroup
which seemed to fit the topic precisely.
From: Ian Stirling <r...@mauve.demon.co.uk>
Subject: Re: Old USENET / Netnews (pre-Dejanews) archives: discussion
Date: 1999/09/01
Message-ID: <936208595.17360.0.nnrp-13.9e98d142@news.demon.co.uk>#1/1
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Originator: r...@mauve.demon.co.uk
T. Gryn <gry...@osu.edu> wrote:
>For those interested in searching past USENET posts, IMHO
>DejaNews is an invaluable resource. Considering the large
>number of posts made per day, that any one company can
>archive so much material, then make it searchable, is a rather amazing
>accomplishment. It would be a serious loss to the online
>community if DejaNews should ever disappear, or their
>database be lost.
I wonder if FOIA'ng certain TLAs might yeild results.
There is of course the problem of the size of the database.
0-85 might be 20G, which is under $100, even if held online.
85-95 I don't really have a good handle on, I'd guess around at least
3Tb, which would be substantially more expensive.
I'd be willing to setup http://www.oldnews.com/ (probably exists)
and do a dejanews like 0-95 service, but the finance needed is way beyond
my means.
One of the large news vendors might be able to do this, with substantial
investment, though I don't think it's likely.
I'd be very willing to pay for such a service, though not that much, maybe
10 pounds/year, or 5p/search.
(pound = 1.66 US dollars)
It would be a great shame if all that history has been lost.
From: b...@shub-internet.org (Brad Knowles)
Subject: Re: Old USENET / Netnews (pre-Dejanews) archives: discussion
Date: 1999/09/01
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In article <936208595.17360.0.nnrp-13.9e98d...@news.demon.co.uk>, Ian
Stirling <r...@mauve.demon.co.uk> wrote:
> It would be a great shame if all that history has been lost.
I don't believe that it has been lost. Back when they were first
setting up DejaNews (and before it was publicly available), they came to
AOL to give a demo of their system.
I spoke with the primary technical person who was there (I think he
had brought with him the one server they had set up so far), and I was
told that they were buying their backfill archive from Uunet, who had an
archive of all USENET news posts that they had ever seen.
At that point, they were buying one month's worth of backfill archive
each month, and archiving their own month as they saw articles come in.
So, after three months of operation, they had three months of their own
news articles archived online, plus three months further back that they
had bought from Uunet.
I don't know how far they carried this operation, and it's entirely
possible that they've since thrown away everything they bought from Uunet
(no need for it, with the years that have gone by).
Of course, I don't think anyone anywhere is archiving all the binary
posts, so even if it was 1GB per day for text-only posts going all the way
back to 1969 (30 years), that'd only be 10.693TB of storage.
Since we know that growth has been exponential over this time
(reaching 1GB/day now), I would expect that it would actually be far less
than this. Even 10% compound annual growth rate over 30 years would
result in only 3.428TB of storage.
--
Brad Knowles <b...@shub-internet.org> <http://www.shub-internet.org/brad/>
<http://wwwkeys.pgp.net:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0xE38CCEF1>
From: Jeremy <jer...@exit109.com>
Subject: Re: Old USENET / Netnews (pre-Dejanews) archives: discussion
Date: 1999/09/01
Message-ID: <rsqvp666j7185@news.supernews.com>#1/1
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Brad Knowles <b...@shub-internet.org> wrote:
>> It would be a great shame if all that history has been lost.
>
> I don't believe that it has been lost. Back when they were first
> setting up DejaNews (and before it was publicly available), they came to
> AOL to give a demo of their system.
>
> I spoke with the primary technical person who was there (I think he
> had brought with him the one server they had set up so far), and I was
> told that they were buying their backfill archive from Uunet, who had an
> archive of all USENET news posts that they had ever seen.
Since you last mentioned that alleged archive to me, I have been unable
to verify its existence. If it existed, I would think that someone would
know about it, so at this point I'm largely convinced that it does not
exist.
At RemarQ, my understanding is that we have back to 1995-ish pretty well
covered (though not yet online). I have also found a potential source of
archived articles from the 1980s, most of which are apparently on ancient
magtapes (which is not necessarily a show-stopper, just a cost-raiser).
I'm trying to get the right people in touch with the right people on that
front. I have not found anyone who even claims to have the early 1990s
(though I admit I'm not conducting an exhaustive search). If anyone
*does* have such archives, I want to hear from them.
--
Jeremy | jer...@exit109.com
"How extravagant you are, throwing away women like that. Someday they
may be scarce." (Casablanca)
From: sc...@zorch.SF-Bay.ORG (Scott Hazen Mueller)
Subject: Re: Old USENET / Netnews (pre-Dejanews) archives: discussion
Date: 1999/09/02
Message-ID: <FHEoGq.6J3@zorch.SF-Bay.ORG>#1/1
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In the quoted message, 'Jeremy <jer...@exit109.com>' wrote:
>At RemarQ, my understanding is that we have back to 1995-ish pretty well
>covered (though not yet online). I have also found a potential source of
>archived articles from the 1980s, most of which are apparently on ancient
>magtapes (which is not necessarily a show-stopper, just a cost-raiser).
>I'm trying to get the right people in touch with the right people on that
>front. I have not found anyone who even claims to have the early 1990s
>(though I admit I'm not conducting an exhaustive search). If anyone
>*does* have such archives, I want to hear from them.
I don't recall what period Henry Spencer had archived. I believe from the
start of Usenet around 1980 forward to some indeterminate point. He had
loaned his tapes to David Wiseman at UWO, who said in private e-mail to me
last year that he'd gotten the data off the tapes, and work was needed on
organizing the archives. Contact me if you'd like to get in touch with David
to offer help.
\scott
From: gry...@osu.edu (T. Gryn)
Subject: Re: Old USENET / Netnews (pre-Dejanews) archives: discussion
Date: 1999/09/02
Message-ID: <37ce903d.147837397@nntp.service.ohio-state.edu>#1/1
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On Thu, 2 Sep 1999 00:10:02 GMT, sc...@zorch.SF-Bay.ORG (Scott Hazen
Mueller) wrote:
>I don't recall what period Henry Spencer had archived. I believe from the
>start of Usenet around 1980 forward to some indeterminate point. He had
>loaned his tapes to David Wiseman at UWO, who said in private e-mail to me
>last year that he'd gotten the data off the tapes, and work was needed on
>organizing the archives.
I think this is the same resource which the A-News archive was taken
from. According email from Bruce Jones, one of the webmasters of that
site, "After about mid-1985 Henry stopped archiving the entire news
spool and only saved stuff like rec.birds (UT Zoology) and
comp.sources." So, that's about the extent of it, apparently.
Tom Gryn...................gry...@osu.edu
From: jose...@tezcat.com (Joe Bernstein)
Subject: Re: Old USENET / Netnews (pre-Dejanews) archives: discussion
Date: 1999/09/03
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This is partly a response to various posts in the thread but mainly
to the post I'm actually following up to. Apologies if this is off-topic
anywhere else - like the original poster, I can't think of a better set
of groups. The reason I don't think it's off-topic to news.groups is
actually the reason I'm interested in the thread. Our newsgroup line
reads "Discussion and lists of newsgroups". For some time now, I've
wanted to recover lists of newsgroups as of old dates, in order to
construct a chronology of newsgroup creation and destruction; and the
period of primary interest to the original poster (roughly 1985-1995)
remained mostly* equally blank to me after an extended effort in this
direction in 1997. I have a couple of documents related to the Great
Renaming, which do not purport to list all newsgroups; books on Usenet
as early as the mid-80s apparently had stopped attempting to do so,
quite aside from the impossibility of dating lists in books.
So. Um. This in *turn*, believe it or not, is partly in service to
the charter archive project which I endlessly hope someday to be able
to do. And the Great Renaming FAQ (whose acknowledgements gave me
crucial pointers in 1997), the charter archive project, and lists of
newsgroups (before the creation of news.lists), have all been topics
of news.groups. So.
In article <37cc36e5.96063...@nntp.service.ohio-state.edu>,
T. Gryn <gry...@osu.edu> wrote:
> For those interested in searching past USENET posts, IMHO
> DejaNews is an invaluable resource. Considering the large
> number of posts made per day, that any one company can
> archive so much material, then make it searchable, is a rather amazing
> accomplishment. It would be a serious loss to the online
> community if DejaNews should ever disappear, or their
> database be lost.
Since I still think that DejaNews *will* die the first time someone with
enough money sues them over copyright, I actively fear that day. Even
with their new interface (which among other things seems inferior for
tracing threads to the most recent version of their old), they remain
invaluable. I'm delighted to hear that RemarQ (is *that* how you
capitalise it?) is archiving too, particularly given that Jeremy is
there, but since I've seen two attempts to compete with DejaNews
fail (Altavista and Reference.com), I still think the day of that
lawsuit against DejaNews will be a bad, bad day.
> Having said that...
>
> Up until their recent reorganization, DejaNews appeared to
> also be interested in recovering the USENET posts made
> prior to DN's inception (mid-'95). Unfortunately, based on their
> current online FAQs, it appears that this effort has been
> discontinued.
Is this positively stated, or is it just that they don't ask?
They may very well figure that if nobody's written by now in response
to that ad, nobody is going to. I think it's highly unlikely that
people sorting out their elderly relatives' estates are going to come
across Usenet archives on diskettes or whatever, and think immediately
"Oh! I should give this to DejaNews!" It's perfectly possible that,
somewhere, there's someone who, like me, was offline for an extended
period, and will find DejaNews on coming back online (as I did, very
quickly); but I have a hard time imagining that someone who had been
archiving a significant portion of Usenet would fit that scenario. So
I suspect that DejaNews probably has not seen any useful replies to
that ad in a couple of years, and in preference to continuing to have
to thank people every couple of weeks for pointers to Bruce Jones's
OldNews, they took the ad down.
> In my personal research, I've come across only two WWW sites
> which really begin to address this need:
>
> ---
> http://communication.ucsd.edu/A-News/
>
> (USENET OldNews Archive; has all USENET posts from May '81
> to May '82)
No, it certainly doesn't. I know this because I once combed it for
information on the creation of groups listed there. (See above.)
There are many cases where there's a post thanking someone for creating
a group, but the post that actually created the group is absent. (In
those days you didn't have control messages. You created a group by
posting to it. Hence all group-creation posts would be archived in
a 'complete' archive, even if as a matter of some sort of policy it
excluded control messages.)
Please remember that "propagation" used to *mean* something, even
before there was an alt.*.
I was on Usenet basically only from about February to June of 1985,
and at that time propagation was still pretty erratic. My server,
the University of Chicago's, was exceptionally well-served, but still.
Maps of Usenet were still being posted at that time, basically to
enable people to get better feeds (whether more full, or simply cheaper,
I couldn't say!). I think I remember the lists of active groups of that
time as fairly routine affairs; it's worth noting though that the lists
posted in the OldNews archive are much more slapdash and have a variety
of authors. (I seem to recall that the second list I found there did
not know of the existence of the first, and omitted groups the first
had listed; but the second appeared to be the True Ancestor of the
document now posted as a sort of checkgroups by David Lawrence.)
The OldNews archive is based on the University of Toronto's incoming
feed, which is certainly an excellent feed for it to *be* based on.
But I'm not sure how news worked over the period of the archive (both
the parts webbed and the parts through 1985 which are still inaccessible).
Seems to me that it's at least *possible* that during some or all of that
period, Toronto might have had a system which accepted (or at least stored)
posts only for groups on its active list; certainly by 1985 the U of
Chicago had a functioning active file - you could not create newsgroups by
typo at our site. In that case, whatever groups-by-typo or controversial-
groups or whatever, that Toronto didn't carry, would be out in the cold.
Certainly there are groups represented in the OldNews archive which
were visibly in existence long before OldNews contains postings for
them, for that matter. There's some discussion visible somewhere
on Bruce Jones's site (I forget whether in the archive, around it,
or in the other side of the site which is a mailing list archive on
the history of Usenet) - somewhere, anyway, there's talk about how
Toronto picked up Usenet gradually. It's not very clear but if you
comb the archive with dates of postings in mind you get the picture:
There are several groups which OldNews only carries from a date in
1982, but which quite obviously have ongoing discussions and
traditions as of the first post present in OldNews.
Given the structure of the early Usenet community, I would be
*seriously* surprised to hear that anyone at all had archived the
period before Toronto started. This is because 1) I'd have thought
Henry Spencer would've obtained copies of such archives to add to
his, or at least would've told Bruce Jones about such; it's a given
that he'd have *known* about them - and 2) it seems unlikely that
Spencer would have undertaken doing something unless nobody else
was known to be doing it. I suppose it remains possible that at one
of the major corporations that was then doing Usenet, e.g. what is
now known as Lucent, they *might* still have actual backup tapes from
the relevant computers, though I'd have thought given the way early
Usenet was paid for (usually by hiding the costs!), the news-admins
would consistently have found ways to take the news spools off of
the backup schedule. (I eventually had to do this while archiving
a single mailing list at a work computer.)
> My concern is that, the longer this material goes uncollected,
> it will be harder and harder to reclaim it in any usable form.
> In addition to it's value to future digital archeologists, there's
> the collected thoughts of thousands, if not tens of thousands,
> of individuals which are encompassed in these posts.
> It just seems a terrible waste for them to be lost. Yes, many
> of them weren't particularly memorable, but there's a lot there
> that was. It's also a history of the development of the Internet,
> through the online discussions of USENET posters.
It's worth remembering that what's lost is what is now seen today as
the golden age of Usenet. This is the time in which the vast majority
of FAQs were written, which tells you something about the volunteer
spirit of that day; it's the time of the Great Renaming and also the
time in which alt.sex.* worked; it's the majority of the time, and
the vast majority of the posts, before the long September and before
spam. This is the time when, to pick just one thing that happened
before I was completely offline and ignoring the topic, Usenet enabled
people to organise a mass campaign against the introduction of "New
Coke" in the then-stunning speed of a few days. (I do not know of
a prior equivalent action done by computer communications, though I
wouldn't be shocked if there had *been* one; at any rate, for Usenet,
it was long a claim to fame.)
I've been reading a lot of Greek and Roman history and art history lately.
Seems clear that in both places, the early, "classic", period, in which
the accomplishments happened that later Greeks and Romans took as
defining their peoples' greatness, is largely lost, because in both
places, there wasn't much care taken to protect the heritage of those
times from technological change and simple attrition, until it was
too late. The nearly complete loss of Usenet from 1986 to 1994 is an
analogous, if much smaller, loss.
Joe Bernstein
* Oops, snipped the original poster's question about other archives
than the OldNews one and the ones listed by Cameron Laird. Amazingly,
it looks like I get to be the first person in a thread *on news.groups
about archives* to mention the impressive archive David Lawrence has
maintained of news.announce.newgroups since something like December 1992.
This provides lists of new newsgroups from April 1991, and from January
1992 on. Cameron Laird's list does not appear to include it. It also
includes other resources for tracing the history of groups, noted below.
You can also find a copy of the List of Active Newsgroups posted by Gene
Spafford January 22, 1991 at
<http://sasun4.epfl.ch/News/Document/List_of_Active_Newsgroups.html>.
I have no idea why this Swiss site keeps it there, but they do. (From
a cursory exploration of the site, I can find no live pages that link
to it.) Using this and the lists of new and bogus groups and current
doings, and actual newsgroup-creation postings, archived by David Lawrence
at <ftp://ftp.isc.org/pub/usenet/news.announce.newgroups/>,
it is possible to figure out reasonably easily whether a given newsgroup
older than Dejanews is from the archive period, or existed in January
1991, or was created in the narrow interval in between. In addition,
note that Lawrence has archived UUnet's feed of newgroup and rmgroup
messages since around 1992 or earlier, and such messages often but
not always include information about the group's creation. These are
at <ftp://ftp.isc.org/pub/usenet/control/>, and are generally compressed.
--
Joe Bernstein, writer
jose...@tezcat.com, j...@sfbooks.com, and other recently unreliable addresses
From: gry...@NOSPAMosu.edu (T. Gryn)
Subject: Re: Old USENET / Netnews (pre-Dejanews) archives: discussion
Date: 1999/09/04
Message-ID: <37d18ec8.17307642@news-stand.acs.ohio-state.edu>#1/1
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Reply-To: gry...@osu.edu
NNTP-Posting-Date: 4 Sep 1999 21:49:50 GMT
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers,news.groups,news.groups.questions,alt.fan.dejanews,news.software.nntp
On 3 Sep 1999 20:46:47 -0500, jose...@tezcat.com (Joe Bernstein)
wrote:
[...]
>> Up until their recent reorganization, DejaNews appeared to
>> also be interested in recovering the USENET posts made
>> prior to DN's inception (mid-'95). Unfortunately, based on their
>> current online FAQs, it appears that this effort has been
>> discontinued.
>Is this positively stated, or is it just that they don't ask?
>They may very well figure that if nobody's written by now in response
>to that ad, nobody is going to. I think it's highly unlikely that
>people sorting out their elderly relatives' estates are going to come
>across Usenet archives on diskettes or whatever, and think immediately
>"Oh! I should give this to DejaNews!" It's perfectly possible that,
>somewhere, there's someone who, like me, was offline for an extended
>period, and will find DejaNews on coming back online (as I did, very
>quickly); but I have a hard time imagining that someone who had been
>archiving a significant portion of Usenet would fit that scenario.
>So I suspect that DejaNews probably has not seen any useful replies to
>that ad in a couple of years, and in preference to continuing to have
>to thank people every couple of weeks for pointers to Bruce Jones's
>OldNews, they took the ad down.
OK, to clairify: in the pre-Deja.com period (before the takeover), one
of the questions in their FAQ was "Do you plan to expand your
database to include older years?" and the answer was (paraphrased)
"Yes! We are continually amassing archives from previous years, and
hope to include these in our archive in the future." In their recent
revisions of their online FAQs, this question has been removed, hence
my assumption that this has moved to the back burner at Deja, if
not abandoned.
I've tried multiple times to get confirmation of the status of this
from DejaNews, but have never recieved a reply.
[...]
>I've been reading a lot of Greek and Roman history and art history lately.
>Seems clear that in both places, the early, "classic", period, in which
>the accomplishments happened that later Greeks and Romans took as
>defining their peoples' greatness, is largely lost, because in both
>places, there wasn't much care taken to protect the heritage of those
>times from technological change and simple attrition, until it was
>too late. The nearly complete loss of Usenet from 1986 to 1994 is an
>analogous, if much smaller, loss.
The analogy which the Internet Archive site invokes is the burning of
the library at Alexandria, not specifically to this issue, but more in
terms of loss of digital information on the Internet as sites come and
go. I don't know if I'd go that far, but the analogy is a powerful
one.
Thanks for the information!
Tom Gryn..........................gry...@osu.edu
From: gry...@NOSPAMosu.edu (T. Gryn)
Subject: Re: Old USENET / Netnews (pre-Dejanews) archives: discussion
Date: 1999/11/24
Message-ID: <383c22ae.81131761@nntp.service.ohio-state.edu>#1/1
X-Deja-AN: 552587029
References: <37cc36e5.96063605@nntp.service.ohio-state.edu>
X-Complaints-To: abuse@osu.edu
X-Trace: charm.magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu 943465243 11817 128.146.191.60 (24 Nov 1999 17:40:43 GMT)
Organization: The Ohio State University
Reply-To: gry...@osu.edu
NNTP-Posting-Date: 24 Nov 1999 17:40:43 GMT
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers,news.groups,news.groups.questions
This is a followup on a discussion thread I started a couple of months
ago regarding pre-1995 USENET archives. I finally got a reply from
someone at Dejanews customer service on this topic; sorry the
news isn't better:
---
Greetings,
Thank you for contacting Deja.Com Customer Support.
At this time there are no plans to recover pre-'95 postings to the
Usenet. It was considered for a time but shelved for now- perhaps
permanently- perhaps not. Sorry for the inconvenience.
Please don't hesitate to contact us should you have any further
questions, and thanks for using Deja.com!
---
Tom Gryn............gry...@osu.edu
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