Google bought Deja-Vu's News Group servers when they went belly-up in
the dotcom bust. Otherwise all of those posts (.5 Tera byte) would have
been lost. Now they're all nicely preserved for some future tyrant who
will undoubtedly use them to persecute "enemies" of the state ;-)

Christopher Tidy wrote:
Okay, I'm a curious person. According to Google groups,
rec.crafts.metalworking has been active since 1992. But Google was only
established in 1998, so how did they obtain the message archives dating
back to 1992? I thought that in earlier days Usenet messages just
expired and vanished into cyberspace...

Chris