🚀 go-pugleaf

On Fri, 27 Jul 2018, John Levine wrote:

> In article <5b537e2d...@news.dslextreme.com>,
> Questor <usenet@only.tnx> wrote:
>> Usenet posts used  to be considered ephemeral; now they're eternal -- even ones
>> made many years before Dejanews, let alone Google Groups.
>
> They were only ephemeral because we didn't have enough disk space to
> keep them all.  The more disk you had, the more you kept.  There were
> usenet sites fed by magtape, and I always assumed they kept the tapes.
>
I have some messages going back to 1996, things I thought were interesting 
enough to save, or messages I intended to reply to, but never did.  Not 
really an "archive" but that was how simple it was to keep messages. 
Actually, when we had a "freenet" here in Montreal in 1996, there was a 
newsgroup only there, and I did archive the whole four months of 
operation.

> As others have noted, the fact that we have archives back to 1981
> tells us that *someone* was always keeping them.

It was google that made the effort to find old archives.  I think some of 
it was related to specific newsgroups, so some one or place would archive 
a newsgroup they thought were valuable.  But I suspect yes, there wasn't 
an online archive going back to 1981, it was saved to tape and somehow the 
tape was never reused.   Maybe in the early days someone did set out to 
archive, the traffic was low enough that someone might.  But until 
dejanews started a public archive, usenet really was seen as "temporary". 
It's hard to believe that it's 22 or 23 years since dejanews came along, 
which is now longer than the time between the start of usenet, if we use 
1981, and dejanew's arrival in 1995 or 1996.

   Michael