If you are looking for a list of significant USENET posts, including this one by Bezos, go to: http://www.google.com/googlegroups/archive_announce_20.html The list was created in 2001, when Google Groups reconstructed a huge archive of USENET postings.
I don't know why exactly, but it's really grating me that people have been replying to them. It may go against the spirit of Usenet but it would have been nice if Google disabled replies in their user interface, or at least filtered the display somehow.
It's like going to a museum and seeing chewing gum stuck to the sides of the exhibits. "OMG 30 Years..." - yes mate, thanks for that.
It's like going to a museum and seeing chewing gum stuck to the sides of the exhibits.
I agree with you, but on a fun side-note, I remember climbing the bell tower of a centuries-old church in the middle of nowhere, and being staggered by the amount of Victorian-era graffiti carved in to the walls.
I guess that the need to write "TOM WOZ 'ERE" goes back a long way.
It's funny, new graffiti is vandalism, but old graffiti becomes history in and of itself. At the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, they have an entire Egyptian temple that at some point was shipped across the ocean, and to me the most fascinating part of it was the graffiti left by occupying British soldiers long after it was built. Go figure.
It's time someone setup an alternative usenet archive to Google Groups.
The only people to do this were DejaNews.com, later acquired by Google.
Then there was the 'look, we recovered all this old stuff off tapes' which is locked behind captchas and against the open spirit of usenet. [edit: the tape archive is available here http://archive.org/details/utzoo-wiseman-usenet-archive]
Perhaps the Internet Archive should archive usenet?
Having an archive that is properly searchable, and which isn't broken when re-ordering the results, would be lovely. (EG: Google groups often falls over when trying to sort by date.)
"I wish Lucas & Co. would get the thing going a little faster. I can't really imagine waiting until 1997 to see all nine parts of the Star Wars series."
