Jules coughed up some electrons that declared:

On Wed, 16 Sep 2009 18:15:35 +0100, tim..... wrote:
Deja.come was flat broke and the archive was only days away from being
lost
forever before Google stepped in where absolutely no-one else would. You
may not like what google have done since, but the alternative was
possibly worse.

Interesting - didn't know that! I remember when deja were building the
archive and patching together bits from here, there and everywhere -
wonder what happened to all the original media that the data was on? I
wonder if folk sent their CD / hard disk / data tape / disk pack off to
deja in the mail, or whether it's all (more or less*) still out there, and
deja just accepted stuff uploaded over the 'net?

Presumably a lot of people would have binned any local copy they had after
they assumed that some big company was going to do something responsible
with it.

cheers

J.

Well, Google did continue that work, receiving backup taps and wotnots from
various sources and adding to the archive.

Suddenly that long forgotton flame war with a hint of Godwin was now
appearing 20 years later with the OP's full name and email attached.