🚀 go-pugleaf

On Fri, 27 Jul 2018 11:52:26 -0400, Michael Black <mbl...@pubnix.net>
wrote:

>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

I was on usenet newsgroups about 1992. Here and about 3 others. Before
that, about 1990, I was briefly on a newsfeed sent over to bitnet... I
am not certain of the exact configuration. My account in 1990 was
Bitnet, and likely I received this and one other newsgroup as a
digest.