The End User: What came before blogs

IHT: "When America Online announced last week that it was discontinuing access to Usenet newsgroups, the online reactions fell into two main groups: 'What's Usenet?' and 'Good riddance.' AOL's move was largely technical - its subscribers have other ways of gaining access to these discussion forums, and access for everyone else hasn't changed - but it symbolized the evolution of one of the Internet's great contributions to global communications.

Google, in particular, now wants to shape that evolution of what has been called the Internet's subculture or back channel. Usenet newsgroups, recognizable by their unique naming system, like rec.crafts.jewelry or comp.sys.hp.misc, came to life on the Internet around 1979 as semipermanent bulletin boards. You could post a question to alt.animals.dogs.collies, and answers from fellow collie devotees from around the world would be available for anyone to read.

Rightly or wrongly, AOL itself gets a lot of finger-pointing for polluting newsgroups: When it first opened access to them for its millions of subscribers around 1995, a lot of the worthless postings came from @aol.com addresses. Savvy "insiders" made much of this annoying behavior from "newbies," despite the occasional reminder that "you were once a newbie too!" Today, after a midlife stint under the direction of Deja News, Usenet newsgroups have been given a home by Google, which is now calling them Google Groups - click on "Groups" on Google's home page.

You can search the newsgroup archives back to 1981; you can read current postings; or you can post your own new submissions. I even found some of my own postings from 1995, when I was trying out a new piece of software, in the group in alt.test, set up just for such junk messages. You can also explore a trial version of a new Google Groups at groups-beta.google.com, which lets you start your own topic that can be open or closed to the public without any of the folderol necessary to start your own blog.

If you just want a curious blast from the past, see Google's timeline of interesting newsgroup postings at google.com/googlegroups/archive_announce_20.html.

You can see the first mention of Microsoft MS-DOS (June 1981), the first mention of a compact disc (July 1982), the first "me too" posting (February 1983), the first discussion of the Y2K problem (January 1985), the first mention of the term "search engine" (March 1988), the first "make money fast" post (November 1989), and Tim Berners-Lee's announcement of a "World Wide Web" project (August 1991)."