In article ,
John Rumm writes:
Roger wrote:

Usenet itself does - by a long margin (predates HTTP). This group looks

It predates the Internet, and had a much wider spread than
the early Internet. We used to get some groups on a dialup
uucp feed in the early 1980s, which was the main transport
for Usenet at the time, but a good number of the Usenet links
around the world then were were magtapes sent in the post.

like it was created at the end of '94 if google's archive is to be believed:

http://groups.google.com/group/uk.d-i-y/about?hl=en

The first recorded posting is dated 5/12/94 but I suspect that google
doesn't have anything like a complete archive. IIRC the archive in those
days was deja but deja went to the wall and some time later google got
its hands on dejas archive but as published it is certainly not
complete. Some of my early contributions are missing.

I think when Google bought the archive from Deja they only got about six
years worth. I remember many of my first usenet posts in '95 ish were

Deja had been falling apart prior to Google taking over the
archive and in the final month or so, it couldn't search back
more than around a 6 months to a year. I started archiving
uk.d-i-y at that time, thinking that it might otherwise all
get lost. I stopped when Google got the archive back up working.

not included to start with. Over the following couple of years though
they sought to repopulate the archive using whatever sources they could
find, including CD ROM compendia etc and much of the oldest material did
reappear - but not for all groups - and certainly not for all the groups
outside the traditional usenet hierarchies (comp, rec, sci etc).

I sent them some archives which I had dating back to something
like 1993, but they were sparse (it was a newspool which was
being accidently archived occasionally). I think uk.telecom
would have been the main uk group in my archive (and several
non-uk groups).

--
Andrew Gabriel
[email address is not usable -- followup in the newsgroup]