Comments on: Oldest usenet post?

By: Jim J

Jim J — Mon, 16 Jan 2006 08:15:26 +0000

I’ve seen posts on Google from around April ‘92

By: Alek

Alek — Mon, 31 Oct 2005 21:32:05 +0000

haha… october 1994… some strange student drivel about cyberspace.. dear oh dear… seems like an eternity ago now. thanks for the fun search anyway.

By: Dorothea Salo

Dorothea Salo — Mon, 31 Oct 2005 16:58:58 +0000

1 Sep 1991. Earlier than I thought. Took me a while to remember what my email address was back in those days.

By: Seth Finkelstein

Seth Finkelstein — Sat, 29 Oct 2005 23:46:54 +0000

The USENET archive is known not to be complete - nobody knew anyone would care in the future :-). So the extent varies a lot, depending on what could be found from hobbysists, and what various sources kept.

Me: Feb 3 1986

Probably not my earliest, but it’s up there. I’m net.old.

By: Fiona

Fiona — Sat, 29 Oct 2005 23:36:27 +0000

I usually used aliases I no longer recall, which is probably a good thing as I was mostly posting to music and TV show groups at the time. First post would have been 1997 - the first year I was able to use the Internet. Though I’d been reading about the Internet etc in books for some time, I didn’t have any way of getting access, my school only provided ARPANET until then which seemed cryptic and weird to me.

By: Christina Pikas

Christina Pikas — Sat, 29 Oct 2005 22:49:36 +0000

Marc Smith et al at MS Research have this site called NetScan that gives the first time a person is noted on a usenet group. It only goes back to 1999, though. It also determines unique users by e-mail. Anyway, it’s an interesting way to visualise usenet (which I’ve never used!) and to see related groups.

By: Ruth Ellen

Ruth Ellen — Sat, 29 Oct 2005 18:17:35 +0000

What a fun game!
Mine is November 7, 1994, to alt.banjo. I had no idea that I’d been online that long.