Is there still a good way to browse Usenet archives? When Google bought Dejanews, it made a big thing of how you could go right back to the moments in history - the first smiley, the first mention of Madonna etc. Now Google Groups seems to make historical Usenet really hard to browse - hiding the email addresses and trying to bounce you to modern groups. Or am I missing something?
Point your NNTP client at: nntp.olduse.net
or one of those new-fangled "Web" browser things at:
http://olduse.net/
olduse.net is not an archive, as such, but more of a repeat
performance - "updated in real time as it was thirty years ago" -
the bang!path email addresses are not hidden,
and work-arounds to the "line eater bug" abound.
The Google interface has a "Show Original" function under the "More
messages actions" pulldown, and a "Show unmasked email addresses"
function behind a Captcha. Perhaps I'm missing something?
Neat! Interestingly, many of these stories made it into dead tree form in Karla Jennings' _The Devouring Fungus_, which provides a nice narrative around this folklore and investigates some of these more thoroughly. She also goes into computing history a bit (Babbage, Zeus, etc.)
I was surprised to see it's still in print, so if you're an old neckbeard or interested in computing history, it's recommended.
If you think that's bad, I heard a story about a guy at the local TAFE (Australia's Technical and Further Education) who annoyed all his classmates. This being the 90s, they were still using floppy disks.
Well, one day he annoyed the class a little more than normal. When he went for a bathroom break, they took his floppy disk, removed the magnetic media and replaced it with a circular sander. Sanded the heads right off his FDD when he got home.
