OT question about this group

Google bought Dejanews, the company that actually had the idea of archiving usenet. Still the easiest to remember address to get to the google group search, though last time I used it it was still broken from being "improved". You might not notice if you had not used the "unimproved" search, I suppose.

Still plenty of time pre-archiving in the memory-banks of those of us only half-way to geezerhood.

I thought that the beta version of Google went back to arround

Yep, it's still broken since they went to the 'beta' version almost a year ago. I wouldn't have minded the advertisements, but they didn't have to go borking up the results pages, unfixed since 'beta' replaced the old deja format.. I know I use it a loss less than I did in the past, and that is unfortunate; it used to be a great way to obtain information.

Jon

Dejanews existed before Google, ... long before Google. they archived everything.

Abrasha

Thanks to all for the explanations. As I said, I'm just curious. So was RCM in existence before 1992?

Chris

Google was not the inventor of usenet archives. The company to really do it in a nice way was called DejaNews. They were bought by google a few years ago. That's how google got its archives.

i

The isp they got it from had all. New account and see how many you get.

Martin Martin Eastburn @ home at Lions' Lair with our computer lionslair at consolidated dot net NRA LOH, NRA Life NRA Second Amendment Task Force Charter Founder

Christ> Okay, I'm a curious person. According to Google groups,

Got 'em on CD from the FTP site - see FAQ

:-)} London, Canada

IIRC, it started out as a trial newsgroup (a practice which has fallen by the wayside theses days), and after success as that, it moved to a full RFD and CFV, and became a full-fledged member of the "Big Eight" heirarchies.

O.K. The 1992 archives start out with a posting to trial.rec.metalworking dated 11 Jul 92 01:23:57 GMT, so that was the start of the idea of the newsgroup.

And the 1993 archives start out with an article dated Mon, 21 Dec 1992 21:55:45 GMT posted to rec.crafts.metalworking with the first line reading:

"Oh hey! A new newsgroup! Can I be the first poster?"

so -- that was when it started under the current name.

Note that you can download all of the archives from the FAQ site, .

Beware that some of them have a Windows virus in a few messages, so if you are on Windows, you probably should not uncompress them.

Note that earlier messages are zipped files of all the messages run together, and later ones are gzipped as the technology changed.

It looks as though this archive stops after the first half of

2004 (metal04a.gz), which may mean that the person who was archiving things, and maintaining the FAQ retired at that time.

Enjoy, DoN.

Or for us Enemies of the State to presecute the tyrants.

Its indeed a two way street.

Gunner

"Pax Americana is a philosophy. Hardly an empire. Making sure other people play nice and dont kill each other (and us) off in job lots is hardly empire building, particularly when you give them self determination under "play nice" rules.

Think of it as having your older brother knock the shit out of you for torturing the cat." Gunner

We can joke about this but history has a precedent. Good ol' Joe Stalin sent thousands of intellectuals to Siberia to "count birch trees" based on their published writings before the revolution. Over the years many Usenet posters used their real names and wrote some extremely inflammatory stuff. Good luck to all in the coming storm.

Gunner Asch wrote:

I wasnt joking.

Gunner

"Pax Americana is a philosophy. Hardly an empire. Making sure other people play nice and dont kill each other (and us) off in job lots is hardly empire building, particularly when you give them self determination under "play nice" rules.

Think of it as having your older brother knock the shit out of you for torturing the cat." Gunner

Another reason why I like UNIX :-).

Thanks for the information, Don.

Chris

And google still sucks for usenet access. Dejanews was good, and I can still recall when google took them over.

Google Sucks! was the rallying point. And it did, even worse than it does now.

This is why I became familiar with newsguy.

Jim