Someone kicked a decade of seminal pre-internet communications off the internet.
We all know Google Search has seriously degraded, with tons of duplicate and garbage content from content farms (which I’m sure carry lots of Google ads, so perhaps they don’t care—we're not the customer). But also, searching for my own name (which is globally unique) no longer returns nearly as much as it used to. It used to have hundreds if not thousands of hits to various mailing lists archives, not to mention old Usenet posts, and everything I've written online since.
So for fun, I did a search and ran down the list. Basically, after about 44 results, it’s just a mix of Mastodon posts (often reshares, and not including my profile), an occasional random mailing list post, and references to my megapost on Pseudonyms from the Google+ nymwars.
But here’s the shocker.
The Usenet results are gone.
When I set the date restrictions on my name search, I can’t find anything before 1992. Some of that is because individual articles aren’t being stored on web sites anymore, and the few mailing list archives don’t have dates that Google recognizes. And I thought maybe that was the case for Usenet as well, but nope. It’s been removed from the internet because of some asshole apparently went after them with lawyers to get something redacted. I used to be able to search for things I wrote back in the early 80’s. But no longer.
That’s painful. An important part of internet history erased. (I know, people have private copies of the archive, I even know some of them, but that’s not the same).
For what it’s worth. This is what I got from Google. And there’s more details on the UtZoo Usenet archive at the bottom of this post. There's no blog posts of mine here because they are all offline right now, but I'll fix that soon. Those will go back to 1997.
The weighting here is very biased towards commercial walled gardens. It's clearly no longer based on references from other sites, or my Pseudonym megapost would be much higher. It's based on status of web sites, not content. It's biased against content.
LinkedIn
Instagram
Academia.edu
Flickr (haven't posted anything there in years)
YouTube (ditto)
www.Pinterest (very ditto, not sure I've ever posted anything there)
Quora (ditto)
Apollo.io (scraped from LinkedIn, well done Google)
<break for some images, all actually mine>
Usenix.org (paper I'm listed as a co-author on)
Goodreads
GitHub
Facebook
Foursquare (ancient)
W3C.org (mailing list post from 1996...the first hit that I'd consider old-style internet content)
Gawker (article about a blog post I made about a Sarah Lacy interview with Zuck a long time ago—I mapped twitter sentiment to the video to the interview)
ThreadReaderApp (some of my twitter threads)
Palmer House Inn (article about Sandy Neck Lighthouse that mentions me)
Infosec Exchange (finally, Mastodon, my most active social media)
opensource.apple.com (some code I wrote a very long time ago)
tr.pinterest (WTF google? Again?)
Tribute Archive (my aunt's obit)
PCWorld on abcnews.go.com (mention of a blog post I wrote analyzing the Google Orkut worm--remember Orkut?)
blogs.gnome.org (kurt von finck's blog referencing a tiny blog post I made about being in Maine)
perl.apache.org (changelog for Embperl mentioning a bug I reported)
Stack Overflow (my home page, again, old)
ScienceDirect (description of a paper I wrote for INTERACT '87)
support.google.com (support question)
Ad, offering to search about info about me in Maine (presumably because that's my current location)
cohost.org (post, summary oddly pulls in the last sentence of my bio, which is mentions my daughter)
spaf.cerias.purdue.edu (Yucks Digest V2, a (true story) joke I posted to rec.humor.funny (Hi @spaf)
Birdeye.com, a review of their dog doors four years ago.
unice.fr (a copy of the emacs bindings I made for Mac text areas)
Forbes.com (a comment on an article about Dragon Systems, with the wrong summary)
IRTF Anti-spam Research Group thread (another mailing list archive)
UCLA (reference to the web version of Phil Agre’s Red Rock Eater Digest that I maintained through 2004)
A reshared mastodon post about XYZ on DTSS
Another mastodon reshare
NetBSD (same software Apple had)
More Mastodon (this time my pixelfed account)
Playstation.net (copyright for same software again; in BSD libc)
perl.org (a mailing list post)
justia.com (a patent, the rest show up eventually elsewhere, very random)
tronche.com (Inter-Client Communication Conventions Manual for X Version 11, R6. Thanks for being in the public review)
After that, it's basically Mastodon posts and occasional mailing lists, and some references to my megapost on Pseudonyms. I used to be able to find Usenet stuff using a date limit to the 80's, but not anymore. If I date limit, I find the earliest content is 1992 (A Google Groups post, a mention in the Motif Programming Manual ("just because he's cool" 🤣)), and more copies of the ICCCM manual.
Searching for my name and “usenet” gets a usenet search engine, which does not appear to be working. http://benschmidt.org/usenet/, the reason becomes clear…
Looking at archive.org/usenet, I find the quote below. As of 2020, they are offline. WTF?
> This is not a collection of the UTZOO Wiseman Usenet Archive.
>
> 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.
No wonder it's not in search anymore. What the fuck.
If I search for "apollo!nazgul", I only find 7 results.
A decade of my life, of many people's lives, got erased from the internet.
Born this day 1931: Fred Brooks, software/architecture pioneer.
"Einstein repeatedly argued that there must be simplified explanations of nature, because God is not capricious or arbitrary. No such faith comforts the software engineer." #ComputerHistory
Celebrating a computing pioneer! Happy Birthday to the Harvard Mark I which is 78 years old!
Also called #IBM ASCC, it was a colossal 51-ft long, 9,445-pound machine. Despite trigonometry taking over one minute, it broke new ground by using punched paper tape for data storage.
Retired in '59, it remains a cornerstone in computing history as it played a crucial role in the war effort during the latter part of World War II.
OTD 1965: IBM announces the System/360 Model 67, their first system intended for time-sharing, and support virtual memory. Lots of interesting history around this machine. A thread: \ #ComputerHistory
Dear women, pioneers of computing, early programmers and all of you, who took us into the digital age, thank you. On this International Women’s Day Computer History Museum Slovenia congratulates you for all your contributions. Introduce yourselves to us, so we can get to know you personally, hear your stories and learn of the history as you remember it happening.
🦕🖥️ The Lear Siegler ADM-3A terminal (1976) looks like it's straight out of The Flintstones 😃 We received it 12 years ago from the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, and it dates back to the times before the influential VT100 terminal.
🟥⬛ Within our collection, we proudly house three rare household computers, the Oric Nova 64, specifically adapted for the Yugoslavian market from the Oric Atmos (Tangerine Computer Systems, 1984). One of these units is particularly fascinating due to its inclusion of engraved Yugoslav (YU) characters. 😍
📸 Upon your request, here are additional photographs showcasing this exquisite piece! 🇸🇮 The Slovenian Iskra Delta "Triglav" computer is a testament to Slovenia's remarkable contributions to computing, adding significantly to the prestigious Iskra Delta series that debuted in the 1980s. 💻🌟
🇫🇷🕸️ Impeccably preserved Minitel 1 terminal, the device that allowed people in France to 'surf the web' since 1982, even before it was officially invented. It's a kind of two-way Teletext - users could not only receive data (at 1200 bit/s) using the built-in modem but also send it - albeit at a modest 75 bit/s. France Télécom only shut down the service in 2012, while Teletext continues to thrive in Slovenia! 😎
The same cardboard box, opened. Inside is a smaller cardboard box, two gray painted metal things, and a plastic box. The smaller box has #2018 written on it, then scribbled over.
🎮🐱 The Atari Lynx (Lynx II in the photo) is the first portable console with a color screen from 1989. Like many others, it unsuccessfully attempted to compete with the Game Boy, even though it has several advantages over it:
🌈 Backlit 4096-color LCD with a resolution of 160×102.
💥 A special chip for hardware-accelerated graphical effects.
👈 Left-handed mode.
Starting my PhD research in August and will look into gender aspects of early Swedish computer use. so, are there any #computerhistory researchers here to follow?
(Photo: 1962 interview with Vera Andersson, who used to be a programmer but now is a "tape librarian" handling magnetic tapes with different subroutines)
The most renowned Slovenian computer is a server known as Stenar. 💻 Acquired in the independence year of 1991, Stenar was instrumental in connecting Slovenia with the world, facilitating the free flow of information. 🌍🔗 At our museum, Stenar proudly stands as a permanent exhibit, open for public viewing.