🚀 go-pugleaf

On Fri, 3 Aug 2018, John Levine wrote:

> In article <5b649d7a...@news.dslextreme.com>,
> Questor <usenet@only.tnx> wrote:
>>> 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 never heard of sites getting their newsfeed via magtape, but I suppose it
>> is possible.
>
> It definitely happened, I knew the guy who made the tapes.  It was a
> government agency that didn't want any live connections between their
> computers and the outside.  The tapes probably slowed things down by a
> few days but in that era it wasn't a big deal.
>
Even circa 1995, on a computer BBS, I can remember replies appearing 
before the original message.  It seemed to improve a lot in the next few 
years, but  I do recall even that late noticing a sluggishness that was 
probably much worse in the early days.

I remember in the early nineties someone mentioning they were reading the 
ham radio newsgroups via floppy disc, someone with usenet access would 
copy a batch of messages, and then pass out the floppies at the local ham 
club.  Read only, but if you didn't have access, better than nothing.  I 
suppose that's too late to have value as an archive, but so long as that 
sort of thing was happening, it probably did result in dusty boxes full of 
old messages, an inadvertent archive.


>>> As others have noted, the fact that we have archives back to 1981
>>> tells us that *someone* was always keeping them.
>>
>> A more likely explanation is that they found full system backups, and restored
>> the news spool from them.
>
> Possibly.  I have full archives of comp.compilers because I'm the
> moderator.
>
It's much easier to imagine an archive like that, to a specific 
newsgroup. Someone is interested in the topic, so they proceed to archive 
it.

But when google announced they had messages goimg back to 1981, I think it 
was from finding a reasonably full archive, and I ssupect it was because 
of backup tapes rather than deliberate archiving.

   Michael