Googles of delights

I've had a great time perusing the new old Usenet posts on Google.com. It took me a while to find the various logins I'd used back in '83 or so, getting on news any way I could. I've waited a long time for other people's backup archives to restore copies of these files to my hands. Thankfully, I didn't say anything too embarrassing. I think that aspect will have repercussions. What's the online world going to be like when your off-hand comments will be around forever? Search for someone's posts, click on the link of their name, and presto, you can see everything they've posted, including that plea for companionship to net.singles back in 1983. One fun aspect has been seeing who jumped into threads back then - before they were famous for other reasons. For example, I hadn't remembered that Larry Wall hung out on comp.sys.amiga for a while in the early days. I have also done what someone else here predicted: look for people who had old machines to dispose, and ask them what happened to them. I focused on the Terak, for my museum at www.threedee.com/jcm . I also used the archive to find people who worked at Terak back when. I found several names I hadn't known before. Given a unique name and a history of working in the computer business, it seemed I could find current e-mail addresses for about half of the names I searched. I fired off notes to find out if they'd kept any memorabilia or disks. I hope someone builds a historical directory of links to historically relevant posts. I might take on the task myself. - John