It's always fun to realize that USENET is still out there humming along. I still remember the thrill of working on my ancient Delphi/Object Pascal projects, and posting questions... waiting a few hours and checking back for responses. There was no "instant gratification" in those days. (I wasn't really using IRC).
Opening this, and just searching "Delphi" I see that USENET never did get that "censorship" that I always assumed would eventually happen. The group names alone are truly unhinged. The Wild West is still.... wild!
Usenet archives have helped me tremendously. For example, I'm looking for info on an old (non-xenix) Unix for the apple Lisa and it gave me a name (and after a bit of digging, an address) of someone who was trusted with the remaining stock after the company that made it went under
I ran the tech side of the most popular independent ISP in Chicago (I guess they were mostly all independent back then) in the mid-late 1990s, and Usenet was the biggest nightmare we had to deal with. We were solid at it, too (Freenix-ranked, independently worked out the INN history cache, &c). Nothing we did had more fussy hardware associated with it.
The problem for us wasn't spammers; it was binaries. That's what killed Usenet.
Does anyone know if this is still the most comprehensive archive? I'd like to know if the owner found any of the missing 91-01 datasets or if they are available anywhere.
I had tried this site a year or two ago and found it unusable then, but it seems greatly improved now. I found posts as old as 1982, but recent coverage seems to stop around April 2022. Crucially, it supports full-text search on posts within a specific group - something which my own site https://newsgrouper.org cannot do. I find the user interface a little awkward, but it does now appear to be a really useful resource.
Usenet was great in the late 90s and early 2000s. I posted a lot, and met some great people. I got a job doing tech review of books about WAP and WML from my posts in a group about the forerunner to mobile internet, and another job with a company making intranet software from some posts about ASP and vbscript. I've no idea where I'd go for that sort of forum today.
What we have today is drastically, unquestionably better that what Usenet offered. The very fact that we're conversing in real time in a coherent thread where everyone sees the same messages is a basic task Usenet was not fit to provide.
It got ridiculous pretty quickly. The overhead to spam was so low as the protocol was designed to be low friction for posting. The system then took care of carrying the payload everywhere in a reasonable time. People fought back with filters and kill lists. But was not really enough.
Once the ISPs decided they did not want the added cost of running the servers usenet tanked pretty quick. Still alive here and there. Not even close to what it could have been or even was.
Surprised someone has not made a mastadon to usenet transfer protocol. It almost fits both projects goals.
https://eternal-september.org/ last I checked there was still some activity on comp.misc after Slashdot pissed everyone off with their Beta a decade or so ago (same time Soylent News spun off as well). Definitely a few others with a handful of posters.
But yes, it's definitely small islands in a sea of spam or just dead groups.
Me too, but not for usenet. The server-to-server protocol is a low ceremony, high observability, standardised and battle-proven gossip-flood protocol with hierarchical channelisation and robust mature tooling, ideal for eventually-consistent distribution of telemetry and control messages over a node mesh of uncertain reliability up to global scale. What's not to like?
I'm sorry, it's only for people I know personally. Also, it only holds minor Usenet hierarchies like the vestigial dk.*.
It's not too difficult to set up INN2, and it's easy to get an external feed. It uses minimal resources, and there is hardly any maintanance once it has been installed and configured.
weird, it seemed like the search index didn't go back past 2003. And then I tried a few more searches and found some hits. So I guess the index is a little spotty?
But try a few search terms, you might find what you're looking for.
Seems to have patchy coverage in the places I was looking, and date range search wasn't working for me. OTOH, I think I found some posts not archived by Google...
Opening this, and just searching "Delphi" I see that USENET never did get that "censorship" that I always assumed would eventually happen. The group names alone are truly unhinged. The Wild West is still.... wild!
Even back then, though, it was always under attack by spammers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence_Canter_and_Martha_Sie...
The problem for us wasn't spammers; it was binaries. That's what killed Usenet.
(I loved Usenet, but also: good riddance.)
It got ridiculous pretty quickly. The overhead to spam was so low as the protocol was designed to be low friction for posting. The system then took care of carrying the payload everywhere in a reasonable time. People fought back with filters and kill lists. But was not really enough.
Once the ISPs decided they did not want the added cost of running the servers usenet tanked pretty quick. Still alive here and there. Not even close to what it could have been or even was.
Surprised someone has not made a mastadon to usenet transfer protocol. It almost fits both projects goals.
But yes, it's definitely small islands in a sea of spam or just dead groups.
Not the one you were replying to, but this is free for anyone for text based Usenet (no binaries).
It's not too difficult to set up INN2, and it's easy to get an external feed. It uses minimal resources, and there is hardly any maintanance once it has been installed and configured.
But try a few search terms, you might find what you're looking for.
https://usenetarchives.com/view.php?id=dk.edb.programmering....