[jay.scot]
[021]


--[ A ready to read archive of old gopher Usenet groups


So, I recently got back into Usenet and thought it would be cool to
browse through old historical posts, especially the ones in the old
gopher groups. You can actually find a bunch of collections dating as
far back as 1981 on archive.org. They've got the Giganews Usenet
Collection, Usenet Historical Collection, and Henry Spencer's UTZOO
NetNews Archive. Although the UTZO Wiseman Archive is no longer
available on archive.org:


	In 2020 after sustained legal demands requesting a set of
	messages within the Usenet Archive be redacted, and to avoid
	further costs and accusations of manipulation should those
	demands be met, the archive has been removed from this URL and
	is not currently accessible to the public.

	Included in this item is a file listing and the md5 sums of the
	removed files, for the use of others in verifying they have
	original materials.


You can still find a copy from a few well-crafted searches.


Anyway, when I downloaded these archives, I realized that most of them
were in mbox format, which kinda sucked for reading. So, I ended up
splitting them into spool files, which made it much easier to read using
slrn. Some of the archives seemed to be ripped from Google Groups at
some point, so I took out all those additional X-Google-* headers from the
posts.


The end result is an archive that's around 20MB compressed and 105MB
uncompressed. It covers alt.gopher and comp.infosystems.gopher from 1992
to 2013, with approximately 22,000 posts. It's all set up and ready for
anyone with slrn installed to dive into. I even included a slrn
configuration file with some decent default settings.


To check out the archive, just follow these steps:


    curl -O gopher://jay.scot/9/files/usenet/gopher-usenet-archive-1992.tar.gz
    tar -zxvf gopher-usenet-archive-1992.tar.gz
    cd gopher-usenet-archive
    slrn -f newsrc -i slrnc


There are a few posts from 2000 that look kinda weird and might show up
as if they're from 1970. And with that, we reach the end of this phlog!


	Newsgroups: alt.gopher,comp.infosystems.gopher
	From: emv@msen.com (Edward Vielmetti)
	Subject: Welcome to comp.infosystems.gopher!
	Date: Fri, 7 Aug 1992 05:18:35 GMT

	Hello, and welcome to comp.infosystems.gopher.  The newgroup
	message went out yesterday, and we're going to migrate traffic
	over from the old alt.gopher group into the brand new "official"
	group.


.EOF