> instead, now the best Usenet archive we have is saved from some old tapes from one or two universities,
The archive is online, I just downloaded a copy.
The first major Usenet archive was dumped from the old tape of the University of Toronto's Department of Zoology, it covered the posts their server received from late 80s to 1991. You can download it from here. https://archive.org/details/utzoo-wiseman-usenet-archive. It's ~2 GiB in compressed gzip, ~20 GiB in raw. Another is The Internet Archive's "Usenet Historical Collection", contains post made in the 90s, donated by an anonymous user, around ~200 GiB. https://archive.org/details/usenethistorical&tab=collection
The UTZoo's archive is very handy to have. There are a million posts to read and no spam and low-effort posting at all (by modern standards, even many flame wars seem to be high-quality). The downside is no external resources is accessible, and nobody is going to reply you. Feels like trapping inside the fake 3D Hologram of the Usenet golden age, created by a supercomputer in the abandoned space station, as in the plot of Otomo Katsuhiro's Memories.
Unfortunately, the original archive from DejaNews/Google Groups, the most authoritative and complete source is inaccessible by the public. Google, a Search Company, Has Made Its Internet Archive Impossible to Search http://motherboard.vice.com/read/google-a-search-company-has...
I can't understand why Google just doesn't release its archives. To what end are they keeping it private? How is it a significant competitive advantage for anything they do?
Google keeping the archive locked up was what (many years ago) made it clear to me that it stopped being the company of "don't be evil". In fact, locking up the archive is about as gratuitously evil as you can get short of actual violence and theft.
Because they are building a profile of you to sell your information to advertisers and anyone else interested. If they just GAVE data away, how could they market what you are looking for?
The archive is online, I just downloaded a copy.
The first major Usenet archive was dumped from the old tape of the University of Toronto's Department of Zoology, it covered the posts their server received from late 80s to 1991. You can download it from here. https://archive.org/details/utzoo-wiseman-usenet-archive. It's ~2 GiB in compressed gzip, ~20 GiB in raw. Another is The Internet Archive's "Usenet Historical Collection", contains post made in the 90s, donated by an anonymous user, around ~200 GiB. https://archive.org/details/usenethistorical&tab=collection
The UTZoo's archive is very handy to have. There are a million posts to read and no spam and low-effort posting at all (by modern standards, even many flame wars seem to be high-quality). The downside is no external resources is accessible, and nobody is going to reply you. Feels like trapping inside the fake 3D Hologram of the Usenet golden age, created by a supercomputer in the abandoned space station, as in the plot of Otomo Katsuhiro's Memories.
Unfortunately, the original archive from DejaNews/Google Groups, the most authoritative and complete source is inaccessible by the public. Google, a Search Company, Has Made Its Internet Archive Impossible to Search http://motherboard.vice.com/read/google-a-search-company-has...