I just saw this on /., the Google USENET archive has
been expanded back to
May 12th, 1981! It's a great day for Classic Computing! Looks like the
oldest message in their archive is DEC related since it talks about a Unibus
Versatec interface card.
Depends on the group, I think... I found that comp.sys.cdc
goes back to February 1989, just a bit before CDC killed
off ETA...
-dq