Google's 20 year archive of foot-in-mouth

Google has expanded their usenet archive all the way back to 1981. And here I thought Deja's past archive dating back to spring 1995 was impressive. I have no idea where they managed to scrounge up the older material, but I've been able to find my own posts going back to Jun 1991. Woo!

Bruno

On an unrelated note, it's my 1-month empeg BBS posting anniversary. :)

Cool! Perhaps soon they will have dug up all of FIDOnet, and somehow old non-networked BBS's going all the way back into the 70's... ? :-D

Calvin

Heh, sounds like someone found the hard disks to some old news servers.

It really is creepy. I'm finding old posts I made in 91!!! eek! :-) Back when I used to be a regular on Nyx! :-)

Calvin

Indeed, there are some posts I made to net.micro.amiga in the late 80's when I was still in high school. Eeep.

Yeah... And I just crashed their server by typing in a search for "Make Money Fast."

I hear "Free College Degree" and "Learn all about your NEIGHBORS" work, too.

They didn't filter out the SPAM from their new archive? Oh man... I think they still have a ways to go befor the match everything that was possible through Deja. Even though they offer some really good functionality already, I'm not entirely pleased with the interface.

Bruno

I have postings in the Amiga groups as well.

Calvin

I don't even want to see my old amiga advocacy posts. :)

Bruno

Oh my god - I made over 2000 posts between 92 and 94 - what a mouthy git I was!

Thank god I'm quiet and reserved now

Rob

You must have been slacking then, because since 21/05/99 10:37 AM you have made 2506 posts to this BBS. That's nearly 3 posts a day, 7 days a week...

Which of course pales into insignificance when you realise Tony is soon to hit 6000 posts.

I love Google's archive...

So did anyone else know that Tony wrote an FAQ about the BFG9000 in Doom ?

That can't be right - I remember a Tuesday last month when I didn't post anything to the BBS!

Rob

I'm horrified to see the posts that I must have understood when I made them, but barely understand now:

http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=90TMS.92Oct26224022%40tw200.eng.cam.ac.uk
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=90TMS.92Jan18131121%40tw106.eng.cam.ac.uk

whereas later on, I'm reduced to crap like

http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=s8elolpzsf.fsf_-_%40suilven.cam.eu.citrix.com

Please tell me I'm not the only one who's descended this much!

So, is there some kind of correlation between Amiga ownership and empeg ownership? You had to be a little bit different to want an Amiga back then, even though it was clearly superior to the then current 512K Mac or IBM PC/AT.

Hmm...

So did anyone else know that Tony wrote an FAQ about the BFG9000 in Doom?

There's a slightly newer one than that at my home page.

It gets even better, though. If you look at the FAQ, there's an LMP file referenced as the "level one strafe trick". Well, check out this thread here on the BBS...

I always wanted an Amiga, but could never afford one. I had to make do with my old Dragon 32 (based on a TRS-80 / Tandy Color).

ROFL

I just started reading back on some of my old posts, thinking I would be totally embarassed. Truth is, some of that stuff was pretty darn funny.

All this talk of newsgroups made me fire up my Agent newsreader again. After having not used it for more than a year. Only to find that...my provider has blocked most of the newsgroups! E.g. all the alt.* newsgroups are gone. This really s*cks! Anybody know of a good free public newsserver which doesn't censor it's groups?

mmm... Newzbot tracks a multitude of servers which are free and have a lot of groups, but the thing is they don't tend to stay around very long, as the owners of the servers realize that the entire world is using them.

Anybody know of a good free public newsserver which doesn't censor it's groups?

And while you're at it, how about a five-star restaurant that serves its meals for free? Or a BMW dealership which gives away the cars?

Running a news server requires a massive amount of hardware resources. That's why many ISPs delete the ALT newsgroups because they are responsible for most of the bloat. The owner of my ISP once told me that replication of alt.binaries.multimedia and its subtrees accounted for most of the data traffic on the backbones.

However, it seems that some people are crazy and still maintain public news servers. A list can be found at http://www.newzbot.com. Be warned that these don't stay up forever.

Most good news admins set up their servers to time out the binaries groups more quickly. In fact, my favorite news server software (the Cyclone/Typhoon/Breeze series, which has been passed through at least three companies in as many years) sets up news spools based solely on size. When the size limit is reached, it automatically starts overwriting old articles. Makes maintenance a much easier thing.

Also, I doubt that that much backbone traffic is really spent distributing news articles. You have to realize that there are fairly few news servers that actually house those big newsgroups. (Probably one or two for each major ISP, one for each major university, one for each commercial news source -- likely less than a thousand worldwide.) And the distributed nature of NNTP really optimizes everything. I'm sure that all of the real players have one or two big news servers that feed to their customer delivery servers. Of course, the last time I was working on a backbone was several years ago, so I'm probably just talking out of my ass.

And while you're at it, how about a five-star restaurant that serves its meals for free? Or a BMW dealership which gives away the cars?

Hey, it wasn't a problem for five years for my ISP to privide them. I wouldn't be asking this if they still would. I have no problem with providers deleting *some* newsgroups (like most of the porn stuff), but I do have a problem with it if they completely cut an entire branch. I also don't remember being informed that they would make such a cut either. They could've at least told me!

I don't care if it takes massive hardware resources to provide them. That's what I (and about 1 million other people) pay them for every month!

Hey, it wasn't a problem for five years for my ISP to privide them.

Of course not. But they weren't offering them for free to the general public. They were offering them to paid subscribers.

I agree that it sucks when ISPs take away features from their users, I've had it happen to me. So I do sympathize. I just wanted to drive home the concept that one gets what one pays for, and you can't expect newsgroups to be freely available in an easy fashion.

Mediaone yanked all the good binaries groups. I've bellied up and paid for a usenetserver.com subscription. Three farms and some pretty long retention times. I'm pretty happy with it except that I'm using Morpheus quite a bit now when I need something in particuar. I remember being pretty PO'd the night I realized M1 had pulled them. Still ticks me off a little, but I'd rather they cut that than go bankrupt.

-Zeke

Hi.

Also, I doubt that that much backbone traffic is really spent distributing news articles. You have to realize that there are fairly few news servers that actually house those big newsgroups. (Probably one or two for each major ISP, one for each major university, one for each commercial news source -- likely less than a thousand worldwide.)

My ISP (one of three actually) uses a two-staged news system, one news server (diavolo) at its IP uplink, one on the internal network. Additionally, it has a satelite news feed from cidera. Well, the satelite feed carries "only" about 95% off all news posts (but supposedly 100% of the groups that are publicly available). It still reaches 10Mbit/s 24h/day. After removing the top 10 newsgroups (among those one or two alt.binaries.multimedia.*) about 4Mbit/s are left, removing the top 25 newsgroups, the whole bunch drop below 1Mbit/s.
Taking into account that this particular ISP (with about 500 customers) has a 2Mbit uplink only, that could easily be eaten away by news only.

cu,
sven

So I too am guilty of having an Amiga and I've also been wondering about this connection with the empeg community...

And what better way to find out, but have a poll?

Except there are some problem with your poll. :) You're missing the coolest Amiga of all, the A3000. You're also missing the A1200 and we can't select multiple items. I've owned A500(1MB), A2000(8MB) and A3000(10MB)

Bruno

mmm... Newzbot tracks a multitude of servers which are free and have a lot of groups, but the thing is they don't tend to stay around very long, as the owners of the servers realize that the entire world is using them

They must be the reason so many people try to connect to my machine for news. (Well until my IP changed recently). A while back I had forgotten to limit my caching news server to my LAN, and noticed some other poeple using it. Even after closing it off, the logs kept showing denied connection requests from all over the place.

Yup, that was the situation my ISP was complaining about.

I just wanted to drive home the concept that one gets what one pays for, and you can't expect newsgroups to be freely available in an easy fashion.

Of course you're right. Really, I don't expect miracles. Though that link you provided of public newsservers comes pretty close!

I'm not saying that it's not a massive amount of data, I'm just saying that because of the distributed nature of NNTP, the backbone usage is minimized. The backbone traffic should consists only of articles being shared between massive peers, which are fairly few. Any delivery to a customer's news server counts as standard delivered bandwidth, not backbone traffic, except in exceptional cases. But then, I'm just being a jerk and arguing semantics.

I use news.cis.dfn.de

...You have to wonder how much storage they're using for all their caching/news archives/etc...

I mean come-on - they're almost caching the entire internet right now:)
-mark

Holy (*&^% I jus found posts I made in the late 80s. bwahaha.
Boy were those the days. 2 posts every couple DAYS in most newsgroups. SIGH.

Ed

Ok, I had an Amiga 2000. Deringer 030, 8 megs of ram, 3 hard drives inside, and who knows how many other hop ups. Ok people, fess up.

Calvin

Amiga believers rejoice ... but not too fast.

It woudl be a nice thought that the mast vajority of empeg owners are prior Amiga owners. But this is not the case it seems from your poll. Even though I have played a great deal of "SuperCar II", "Aliens" etc., I have never owned such machinery myself.

Unfornunately the world is not concentraced around a garage company named Commodore, and a computer called Amiga made infamous by being light years ahead of the competition.

I think the question should be formulated more closely like this:

Ugh...unfortunately my past continues to haunt me.

Being a huge hockey fan, I made an angry post many years ago that I THOUGHT was going to drift off into space as random noise. But nope!

Err, thanks Google :P

Hm. Why no A1200? Not only did I own one, I still do (bought it to replace the one I sold years ago). Even tracked down another Alfa Data crystal trackball, a VGA adapter, and lots of original software.

Now, if I could just find a DKB 030 or 040 and a dataflyer external IDE enclosure.

Oh, and all the BlazeMonger products. :)

Didn't The Weather Channel's local forecasts run off an Amiga for a while?

Yep. And many cable programming guides did as well. You can still catch them sitting on a guru meditation every now and then.

Blazemonger.. Haha.. Dan Barett, right?

Bruno

Yep. He's still around doing interesting things, IIRC. I think I actually ran across him on one of the dev lists for the new Linux-based Zaurus, in fact.

And I pulled his name from memory too. :) Of course also remember the "other" Barrett (no relation), Mark. Oh boy, ugh what an arse. :)

Next thing you know we'll have Dave Hanie in here posting (I actually bumped into him on the digicam newsgroup late last year or earlier this year).

Bruno