20 Year Usenet Archive

This is pretty amazing. Amazing that there’s finally a near-complete and total usenet archive for the first time, and amazing to see some of this old stuff. I remember some of these posts and scandals, but not most of them. Got a kick out of the first usenet post from an AOL account – I helped to beta test that service. That message mentioned the fact that CompuServe (CIS) was just starting an Internet gateway. At the time, none of the proprietary services had connections to the net – AOL, CIS, and Prodigy were all self-contained universes. I remember when my CIS ID (CompuServe was command-line only at the time) — 72241,1777 — suddenly got access to the rest of the world and I became 72241.1777@compuserve.com . Everything opened up at once. A few months later, CompuServe got a GUI. Saw the Mosaic browser for the first time later that year. Everything was happening so fast…