Yesterday, Wired Magazine ran a story depicting how Google’s Usenet archive had gone largely missing; today, a followup was posted in which Google assured it was addressing the issue.
We all probably remember Google’s acquisition of DejaNews and the resulting Google Groups interface to the (now dying) Usenet protocol, but this article pointed me towards a bit of internet history I’d never known.
According to a seven-year-old article from Salon it was back in 1981 that Henry Spencer, a network administrator at the University of Toronto’s zoology department, began downloading all of Usenet on a daily basis over a 300 baud modem and saving it out to 120MB magnetic storage tapes. He performed these backups not because of any grand designs of archival history but simply because Usenet was still so small and its userbase so focused that most of what was being posted was highly technical and therefore highly useful to have around.
The backups ran for ten years until the department’s budget for these $15 backup tapes ran thin.
In the winter of ‘91, David Wiseman of the University of Western Ontario (pictured above with the entire Usenet archive) made the drive to Toronto to assume responsibility for the aging archive, quipping years later that these archives, which had only ever achieved a maximum throughput of 1200 baud on the university modems, made the return trip by highway and pickup truck at “a not unimpressive bandwidth, by the way, of some 18Mb/sec”.
It would take ten years for the data to get transferred from those dusty tapes onto more modern disks and ultimately for the University of Western Ontario to bequeath to Google these relics telling the story of the genesis of one of the internet’s earliest protocols. Its release was met with mixed emotions, particularly among the geeks frequenting Slashdot. One commenter in particular found it quite disorienting to encounter his posts from fifteen years earlier, which should serve as an instructional coda to this bit of history:
I just went and had a read at a whole bunch of posts from 10-15 years ago in which I was often a real prick… There’s nothing like humble pie and complete red-eared embarrassment at three in the morning…
I’m in my late twenties now. I’m an author. My name is out there and is unique. Now, when people type my name into Google, they’re going to pull up stuff I posted via free BBSs and tech bars when I was a prick of a teenaged punk-rocker in the ’80s who [it would seem] really had a problem or two.
*cringe*
I’m going to go hide my head in the sand for a while, then quickly ink-jet myself a “live and learn” t-shirt.
![langer:
Yesterday, Wired Magazine ran a story depicting how Google’s Usenet archive had gone largely missing; today, a followup was posted in which Google assured it was addressing the issue.
We all probably remember Google’s acquisition of DejaNews and the resulting Google Groups interface to the (now dying) Usenet protocol, but this article pointed me towards a bit of internet history I’d never known.
According to a seven-year-old article from Salon it was back in 1981 that Henry Spencer, a network administrator at the University of Toronto’s zoology department, began downloading all of Usenet on a daily basis over a 300 baud modem and saving it out to 120MB magnetic storage tapes. He performed these backups not because of any grand designs of archival history but simply because Usenet was still so small and its userbase so focused that most of what was being posted was highly technical and therefore highly useful to have around.
The backups ran for ten years until the department’s budget for these $15 backup tapes ran thin.
In the winter of ‘91, David Wiseman of the University of Western Ontario (pictured above with the entire Usenet archive) made the drive to Toronto to assume responsibility for the aging archive, quipping years later that these archives, which had only ever achieved a maximum throughput of 1200 baud on the university modems, made the return trip by highway and pickup truck at “a not unimpressive bandwidth, by the way, of some 18Mb/sec”.
It would take ten years for the data to get transferred from those dusty tapes onto more modern disks and ultimately for the University of Western Ontario to bequeath to Google these relics telling the story of the genesis of one of the internet’s earliest protocols. Its release was met with mixed emotions, particularly among the geeks frequenting Slashdot. One commenter in particular found it quite disorienting to encounter his posts from fifteen years earlier, which should serve as an instructional coda to this bit of history:
I just went and had a read at a whole bunch of posts from 10-15 years ago in which I was often a real prick… There’s nothing like humble pie and complete red-eared embarrassment at three in the morning…
I’m in my late twenties now. I’m an author. My name is out there and is unique. Now, when people type my name into Google, they’re going to pull up stuff I posted via free BBSs and tech bars when I was a prick of a teenaged punk-rocker in the ’80s who [it would seem] really had a problem or two.
*cringe*
I’m going to go hide my head in the sand for a while, then quickly ink-jet myself a “live and learn” t-shirt.](http://14.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_kr7vowDlNx1qz9aeqo1_400.jpg)
