20 Years of Usenet

Within Google Groups you can find an amazing 20 years of Usenet archives. That’s more than 800 million messages, dating back to 1981. Google calls it “the most complete collection of Usenet articles ever assembled and a fascinating first-hand historical account.” The page listed above has links to some historic posts, such as Tim Berners-Lee’s announcement of the World Wide Web project.

Reading that entry brought back poignant memories of 1989, trying to understand how to use a friend’s Apple computer to learn a hypertext program. Then a few months later into 1990, puzzling over where the dumb terminals in a computer lab at San Diego State University took me, and again trying to comprehend a document on hypertext that I found somewhere in hyperspace.

Five years later I discovered a British academician’s freeware program to create HTML pages using MS Word, and I struggled to produce my first Web site, buried on a server at AT&T. Now we have such easy instruments as Macromedia’s Dreamweaver to perform all sorts of Web tricks. I even use it to monkey around with my blog, and it all started with the original multi-user blog, Usenet.

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