At 02:44 PM 10/17/00 -0400, Douglas Quebbeman wrote:
Now, an unimagineable amount of message traffic, much
of it
having serious potential research use, is gone.
This site says the approximately 16 million postings from
October 1996 to late 1998 consumes 592 gigabytes:
http://www.archive.org/collections/index.html#Usenet
but of course earlier posts are much less space.
http://communication.ucsd.edu/A-News/index.html has May 1981-1982.
With 30 gig drives at less than $200...
- John
From Feb 11 2000 on this list:
Several times in the past I've ranted to this list about my hope
for a more ancient version of DejaNews, a web archive of old
Usenet posts. Below is an e-mail I received from someone who
has the start of an archive. He's searching for more volunteers
for the project. I think this would be a tremendous resource
for classic computer collectors and historians.
- John
To: John Foust <jfoust(a)threedee.com>
Subject: Re: Old usenet news?
From: Michael Stutz <stutz(a)dsl.org>
X-Mailer: MH-E (emacs20)
X-Url:
http://dsl.org/
Date: Thu, 10 Feb 2000 13:16:57 -0500
Sender: m(a)dsl.org
Been thinking about a potential Usenet archive restoration project
lately, how such a project might work.
I don't think it's a one-man job -- too many people are probably going
to have different ideas on how to store it, availability, interface,
etc.
This is what I think needs to happen:
- there needs to be some kind of public discussion area for the
project (like a newsgroup or mailing list)
- a repository needs to be put in place, where people can send their
archives. any size would probably be good enough to begin with, even a
few gigs. hard drives are cheap now and it shouldn't be too difficult
for someone to be able to get at least 10gb, which i think should be
enough to at least begin assembling some of the old years, and
whatever misc. stuff from pre-95 that people have?
While I'm very interested in this, I don't have time to oversee or
coordinate it. (I assume that you don't, either?)
However, I've been assembling what notes I can -- URLs of known
archives, addresses of interested people, related threads. I've begun
putting all this together in html and plan on putting it on the web,
just to make a convergence point for likeminded individuals -- maybe
it might provide the impetus for someone else to begin such a project?
Or at least get the attention of someone who has a 20gb hard drive on
some ftp box at some university or organization somewhere, where some
of the old archives could begin to be reassembled? (I'd think such a
restoration project would make a great research project for someone,
maybe?)
As I think I mentioned before, I've got some archives from specific
groups, and a lot of old threads and even single articles saved. If there
was a coordinator and a system in place (even 1gb to start? or a box
with access to a cd-burner or some other removeable media?), I bet a
post to slashdot would draw in hundreds of people like me, or more,
with their old archives.
m
P.S. On a related note, I'd like to see an open-source replacement for
imdb.com happen, but again it's not a project I can take on right now.