Great Google-ee Moogly!

Awhile ago, I went on about my old .signatures. I did that because Google had finally extended their Usenet archive back to 1995.

Well, that's old news now. Except that using the phrase "old news" is going to cause confusion, because what I'm all geeked up about is the fact that they've now extended the archive back to 1981. That's twenty years! And it turns out that my first post on Usenet was June 9, 1991, so I've been active on the Inter for over ten years, which I find pretty impressive.

I also find it impressive that in their announcement, the good folks at Google have a timeline of important moements in Usenet history. Things like "First mention of Microsoft", "First mention of the Commodore 64", and "First post to alt.religion.kibology by Kibo". Kibo is, um, well, sort of hard to explain. He was this guy, right, and he used to grep the newsfeed for his name.

Oh, um, "grep" is a UNIX command that searches. So "grepping the newsfeed" means that he knew about any mention of Kibo anywhere on Usenet, and he'd respond. Kibo was everywhere! So he was a full-on Usenet god, and it's good to see the folks at Google giving Kibo his proper respect. Plus, he appears to have posted 11,700 articles through today, which is pretty impressive on its own. Incidentally, Kibo's first post with his current account was in May of 1991, and it was to propose alt.tv.small-wonder, which seems odd to me.

It's frightening to realize just how much detritus I've left across Usenet from various different accounts. I used to hang out a lot in alt.folklore.urban, and alt.tv.mst3k. And the Tiny Toon Adventures newsgroup. And alt.tv.muppets. And various other groups. Oh, you have no idea how much time I spent on Usenet. Seriously.

So that's what's going on in my life: reading nonsense I wrote ten years ago. The Internet really is the Information Superhighway!