Some fascinating peeks at history
Some fascinating peeks at history in the making, as well probably more bytes of crap than there are atoms in the universe, at Google’s new 20 year usenet archive. 20 years doesn’t feel like a long time, but some of this stuff… first mention of the IBM-PC anyone… just seems, well, from another world. But then when we hit 1994 it all seems like yesterday (albeit a yesterday that I lived several houses and a couple of PCs ago with a much slower internet connection running under DOS and occasionally, when I could figure out the TCP/IP stacks, Windows 3.1). Gawd, the Green Card spam. That was a story which went round and around for ages. Seems such small fry now.
Next thing, of course, is to look out all my old posts - much tech-heavier than I seem to remember at the time, although one or two from the Demon newsgroups have resurfaced including my favourite ever flame and my very enjoyable argument with Demon’s Malcolm Muir, who I later found to be lying on all counts (Demon was sold to Scottish Telecom a few weeks later, and I subsequently met someone who had worked at Demon at the time and confirmed the “server crash” collapsing floor story).