SCN: Usenet history

[patrick]

Google has really pulled off something grand with having the Usenet
archive available to everyone. It's quite amazing. I have found posts
that I made 12 years ago! It brings back memories.

And the added features of the first this, first that, is quite
something.

Patrick

--- Steve <steve at advocate.net> wrote:
> x-no-archive: yes
> 
> ==================
> 
> 
> The geeks who saved Usenet
> 
> (Katharine Mieszkowski, Salon)---On May 11, 1981, one Mark 
> Horton, then a graduate student at the University of California at 
> Berkeley, using the e-mail address "ucbvax^mark," posted this 
> message to the Usenet newsgroup Net.general:  
> 
> Rusty is right (or is that "Rusty is Wright"?) - we have ALL in our
> 
> .ngfile so I tend to forget this. ALL.ALL may or may not work, but 
> ALL certainly does. Mark  
> 
> Then, the ancient Internet scribe added this ominous postscript:  
> 
> I plan to make the change on Tuesday unless something horrible 
> happens.  
> 
> Horton's message was a response to a previous post, the intact 
> original of which is now lost to history, from one "sdcarl!rusty,"
> aka 
> Rusty Wright. With this incomplete fragment of a cryptic exchange, 
> the history of Usenet, as we have it today, begins.  
> 
> The message is the oldest Usenet posting in the 20-year archive, 
> now searchable on Google. It's the first of some 700 million posts 
> that provide a record spanning the early history to the present of 
> Usenet -- the sprawling public bulletin board, composed of a vast 
> hierarchy of newsgroups, that grew up alongside the Internet
> itself. 
> 
> Granted, this message doesn't exactly have the ever-quotable and 
> historic ring of Alexander Graham Bell braying on the first 
> telephone call, "Mr. Watson. Come here. I need you." But it's not 
> the first Usenet message ever -- it's just the first one captured
> in 
> this vast, yet still incomplete, archive of Usenet's 35,000 topic 
> categories. It's an ordinary exchange between two of the first few 
> hundred denizens of Usenet posting back in 1981.  
> 
> Still, if you squint, you can see glimmers of what's to follow in
> this 
> poignant gem of a fragment. What are these geeks talking about, 
> anyway? It's a meta-post about the system itself, of course! It's
> part 
> of a technical discussion of how Usenet should be administered. 
> And catch that corny play on words, goofing off Rusty's last name: 
> "or is that 'Rusty is Wright'?"  
> 
> Geeks talking amongst themselves on Usenet about how Usenet 
> should best be run, while having fun with homonyms: Almost 20 
> years later, has anything really changed?  
> 
> In mid-December 2001, Google unveiled its improved Usenet 
> archives, which now go more than a decade deeper into the Net's 
> past than did the millions of posts that the company salvaged from 
> DejaNews. Now on a browser near you: a glimpse of the prehistory 
> of the Net culture we all take for granted today. The first "me
> too" 
> post! The first "Make-Money-Fast" post! It's enough to make even 
> a relative newbie nostalgic for a past she never experienced 
> firsthand.  
> 
> The debut of the archive touched off a flurry of chatter among the 
> geeks on Slashdot, some of whom had been there back in the day. 
> There were some grumbles. Imagine what it's like to see your 
> flames from 15 years ago, when Usenet still had the population of 
> a small town, now searchable by anyone on the Web.  
> 
> "Glad I've changed my e-mail address since those long, (best) 
> forgotten days. It wasn't me, I swear," joked one poster to 
> Slashdot. Another one griped: "It's like having naked baby pictures
> 
> of yourself stapled to your forehead when you walk around." 
> (Google vows that at the author's request, they'll delete old
> posts; 
> so if you want to be the Internet equivalent of a rare-book burner,
> 
> go right ahead.)  
> 
> Google gets the credit for making these relics of the early Net 
> accessible to anyone on the Web, bringing the early history of 
> Usenet to all. Michael Schmidt, 29, a Google software engineer, 
> spent the last year and a half playing detective, trying to track 
> down the Internet's lost history: "It was a long and painful 
> investigative process. I was searching on the Web, calling people. 
> There were a lot of dead ends."  
> 
> But it was the geeky pragmatism and historical foresight of Usenet 
> old-timers themselves that actually saved the early history of the 
> newsgroups so that we can all poke around in it today. These 
> "archive donors," whom Google thanks here, gave their copies of 
> the millions of messages they'd saved back to the Net.  
> 
> The tale of how early Usenet was saved begins with one of the 
> Net's great old-timers: Henry Spencer. "Henry Spencer is the real 
> hero, because his contributions are what makes this historic," says
> 
> Schmidt. "Back in the Stone Age of the Internet, he was already 
> archiving this stuff, and he was the only one doing it."  
> 
> Spencer, a legendary Unix hacker -- a species not exactly known 
> for humility -- is pleasantly understated about his role as
> Usenet's 
> great early archivist. He's the first to point out that he wasn't
> really 
> the only one saving those early messages. But the copies he kept 
> of Usenet postings from 1981 to 1991 appear to be the only ones 
> that still exist. "There were several other people who were 
> archiving stuff, but all of them gave up before we did, and as far
> as 
> I know none of their archiving survived," he says. For instance, 
> legend has it that two guys at Bell Labs kept back-ups as well, but
> 
> their stores of these ultra-rare posts are nowhere to be found.  
> 
> "I'm very glad the stuff is finally out there, and I can stop
> worrying 
> about how the only copy might get lost," Spencer says, now that 
> Google has assured the preservation of the more than 2 million old 
> messages he saved. "I'm just glad that this particular great mass
> of 
> data is no longer my worry."  
> 
> One of the early adopters of the computer language C, Spencer is 
> known for his Ten Commandments for C Programmers, as well as 
> for being the coauthor of C News, one of the early programs for 
> transferring and reading Usenet messages.  
> 
> Now 46 years old, he works as an independent consultant, but 
> back in 1981 he ran the computer facility at the University of 
> Toronto's zoology department. While the geeks over in the 
> university's computer science department were busy with the 
> Arpanet, the Department of Defense's system was too expensive 
> for the zoologists.  
> 
> "The zoology department may sound like a funny place for 
> pioneering networking work," says Spencer. "But the computer 
> science department wasn't very interested in this inferior 
> networking. It was very low-tech by their standards. But it worked 
> and theirs didn't. Their opinion changed fast when we started 
> providing e-mail."  
> 
> That's how, in the spring of 1981, with a 300 baud modem, the 
> zoology department at the University of Toronto became a central 
> distribution point for Usenet, when the network was just 2 years 
> old.  
> 
> Traffic was almost unimaginably lighter in those days. Only about 
> 200 people had access to Usenet: "In the first few years, it was at
> 
> least plausible to come in in the morning and read all the Usenet 
> traffic that had come in, and 15 minutes later be off doing 
> something useful," remembers Spencer. But even that low level of 
> traffic was too much for the storage requirements of the day. 
> "Pretty soon, it was necessary to think about expiring old stuff,"
> he 
> says.  
> 
> It wasn't a sense of historical importance that initially led
> Spencer 
> to think about creating an archive. His motivation was much more 
> pragmatic than that: Most of the conversations on Usenet at the 
> time were very technical, and he was reluctant to see the 
> information in them disappear, because it might be useful to the 
> university's geeks: "A lot of the early traffic was about things
> like 
> Unix systems bugs, and it seemed unwise to just throw it out."  
> 
> So the archiving began with 40 megabytes filling up a new mag 
> tape -- each reel one-half inch thick and 10 inches in diameter -- 
> every few months. In this era, messages from the outside world 
> came in at the tortoise rate of 300 baud. ("When we got a 1,200 
> baud auto-dialing modem, that was just wonderful. Twelve-
> hundred baud was just total luxury," Spencer recalls.) As Usenet 
> grew, this meant that Spencer and his system administrators had 
> to be selective about which newsgroups they received and 
> archived, keeping technical conversations but throwing away some 
> of the more general discussions that generated a lot of traffic.  
> 
> "We started dumping stuff that we thought was obviously of no 
> future use, groups that specialized in a lot of talk and no 
> substance, so to speak. For example, fairly early on there was a 
> newsgroup about abortion which specialized in violent arguments." 
>  
> That's why not only the very earliest Usenet posts, before Spencer 
> started archiving in 1981 (Usenet began in 1979) but even some of 
> the posts in the 1980s are still lost. It's too bad; today,
> wouldn't 
> more of us rather see what was being said about abortion in 1984 
> than sift through the arcana of bug fixes in systems that have 
> probably been long since retired? "It was perfectly reasonable from
> 
> the viewpoint of stuff that we might want to use again, but a
> little 
> sad from today's viewpoint," Spencer admits.  
> 
> For 10 years, the nine-track mag tapes piled up, hanging in a huge 
> rack at the zoology department's computer facility. Finally, in the
> 
> early '90s, with the growth of Usenet outpacing the zoology 
> department's budget for $15-a-pop tapes, the general archiving 
> project ended.  
> 
> In the spring of 1991, Bruce Jones, then a grad student in the 
> communications department at the University of California at San 
> Diego, flew to Ontario at his own expense. He was writing his 
> Ph.D. dissertation on the history of Usenet and was eager to get 
> his hands on Spencer's tapes.  
> 
> The 141 tapes, most of which held 120 megabytes of posts, now 
> lived at the University of Western Ontario, thanks to a road trip
> in 
> the middle of the Canadian winter that David Wiseman, the 
> university's network administrator, had taken earlier that year to 
> unburden the University of Toronto's zoology department of them.  
> 
> Jones would spend the next two weeks rescuing the data off them. 
> Not only was the tape technology rapidly becoming obsolete -- just 
> try to find a working tape-reader today -- but the tapes themselves
> 
> do not have anything like a 10-year shelf life.  
> 
> By now the historical import of the tapes was already apparent. But
> 
> spending two weeks running tapes through a tape-cleaning 
> machine and dumping them on disks was the prerequisite to even 
> looking at them. "Spencer had written a program for removing data 
> from tapes when the tapes went bad," Jones explains. "I was just 
> the first person who was willing to invest my time and money -- a 
> lot of people wanted to see what was on them." In two weeks, 
> Jones got through the first 105 tapes.  
> 
> "Usenet has always been about arguing about itself," Jones says 
> of the posts that were unearthed. "And the arguments that you see 
> today are the same arguments that go way back into the early '80s, 
> and I'm sure that those arguments will continue well into the 
> future."  
> 
> Case in point: the fact that the older parts of the archive are now
> 
> available on Google has given Usenet denizens something new to 
> argue about. "I've already gotten three letters from people
> accusing 
> me of trying to make money off these archives," Jones observes 
> wryly. All the "archive donors" gave the posts to Google for 
> posterity.  
> 
> Over the next 10 years, Wiseman got through the remaining three 
> dozen or so tapes by wangling the time and energies of "bored 
> graduate students." But by 1995, constrained by university 
> budgets, the archiving project was running out of disk space.  
> 
> So, Brewster Kahle, the creator of the Web's other major archiving 
> project, the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, chipped in, 
> donating a then-humongous nine-gigabyte hard drive to the cause. 
>  
> In the end, they pulled more than 2,056,000 posts off the 141 
> tapes. "It took us 10 years. I got so busy and everybody else got 
> less interested," says Wiseman, almost sheepishly. More than 2 
> million posts: It doesn't sound like a lot compared to the 700
> million 
> total in Google's archive, but they're the oldest remnants.  
> 
> Apparently someone is still interested. Wiseman used FTP to hand 
> off the files to Google. And just after Google announced the 
> availability of the archive, some rogue used FTP to grab the whole 
> archive off the University of Western Ontario's FTP server -- all 
> three gigs of it transferring in one night. "I have no idea what
> they 
> plan on using it for, since if it's spam e-mail the addresses are
> all 
> wrong," says Wiseman. Now, anyone who wants a full copy will 
> have to ask politely first -- it's no longer on the server.  
> 
> Google filled in the more recent posts not covered by the old 
> DejaNews archive thanks to Jürgen Christoffel of the German 
> National Research Center for Information Technology, who'd kept 
> his own archives in the '90s, and Kent Landfield, a network 
> security developer and the maintainer of FAQs.org.  
> 
> Landfield started archiving with entrepreneurial motives. In 1992 
> and 1993, while at Sterling Software in Omaha, Neb., Landfield 
> had a side project that sold CDs of the Usenet archive. For 
> $349.95 a year, every month you could get a CD burned with the 
> content of Usenet. It was an attempt to cater to the user with a 
> slower modem who still wanted access to every newsgroup.  
> 
> "I realized that there was definitely a valuable historical aspect
> to 
> the CDs themselves," says Landfield. "The reality is, everybody 
> thought that. We're all just a bunch of packrats. We all knew there
> 
> was a value to it, and it was a matter of how and when it would be 
> used."  
> 
> Thanks to these packrats, Google now estimates that 95 percent 
> of the posts ever made to Usenet are now searchable from the 
> site. But Spencer, for one, can't help thinking of all that's still
> been 
> lost -- not just of the other 5 percent of Usenet, but also of the 
> other early history of online communication.  
> 
> Think of the Arpanet mailing lists that were the precursors to 
> Usenet. Spencer points out that while most of the mailing lists
> kept 
> archives, a significant number of them have been lost over time. 
> "The first flame war, things like that, most certainly dates before
> 
> Usenet," he says. "And I would bet that a lot of that material is 
> gone, because at some point, nobody thought it was worth saving."
> 
> 
> Copyright 2002 Salon.com
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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