The History of Usenet: sources

As I put chuqui.com together, I went through any number of notes I kept about things I wanted on the site, and also did research on the net looking things up.

As I did, I realized there didn’t seem to be a place bringing the various resources together, so I’m starting that as well. this is a list of various URLs I’ve run into with stuff I think others might be interested in, especially as glimpses into USENET in its earlier days.

Bruce Jones did a lot of research into USENET in the early 90′s, including setting up a mail list where many of the early USENET hackers got together and talked. Various parts of the archives are still available:

http://communication.ucsd.edu/bjones/Usenet.Hist/

The raw archives of the usenet history list, in a mhonarc threaded format:

http://communication.ucsd.edu/bjones/Usenet.Hist/Nethist/index.html

Here are a couple of postings within the usenet history lists that I call out primarily because they are good exposures of what *I* was thinking and doing at the time.

http://communication.ucsd.edu/bjones/Usenet.Hist/Nethist/0172.html
http://communication.ucsd.edu/bjones/Usenet.Hist/Nethist/0154.html

You might also want to read:

  1. The Social Graph: Revolution or Evolution?   The Social Graph: Revolution or Evolution?: Arguably, the first serious discussion into implementing archival and retrieval of public online information was via Usenet; in...
  2. Voile et Vapeur – USENET meme Voile et Vapeur – USENET meme: From lauriemann via james_nicholl via pecunium: what is your earliest USENET post on Google Groups? Mine is from July...
  3. The USENET Olympics Someday, some poor student working on a Ph.D. is going to try to explain USENET and how it operated (and didn’t) as part of their...
  4. Usenet mavens Fascinating piece on what they’re calling “mavens” in usenet — simply defined, people who answer people who dontt answer people. In the mailing list environments...
  5. Ancient History, and what it’s all about. John Porcaro and I are talking more now than we ever did when we both worked at sun… heh. But he talks about how he...