Re: Archive Any And All Text Usenet

On Sat, 9 Mar 2024 10:01:52 -0800, Ross Finlayson wrote:

Hello.  I'd like to start with saying thanks to Usenet administrators
and originators,
Usenet has a lot of perceived value as a cultural artifact, and also a
great experiment in free speech, association, and press.
 
Here I'm mostly interested in text Usenet,
not binaries, that text Usenet is a great artifact and experiment in
speech, association,
and press.
 
When I saw this example that may have a lot of old Usenet, then it sort
of aligned with an idea that started as an idea of vanity press, about
an archive of a group.
Now though, I wonder how to define an "archive any and all text usenet",
AAATU,
filesystem convention, as a sort of "Library Filesystem Format", LFF.
[...]

Sounds good; I'm interested in full archive of text newsgroups I use
(1300+) but don't know free Usenet servers even go back to when I started
(1996, though tried Internet in museum before Eternal September).  I'm
aware I could use commercial ones that may, but don't know which nor cost/
space.  Is Google Groups the only going back to 1981?  I hope other
servers managed to save that before Google disconnected from peers or some
might turn up back to 1979.

Accessing some old binary ones would be nice also, but these days people 
use commercial servers for those, which probably didn't save even back to
'90s... an archive of those (even though I'm uninterested in most rather
than a few relating to history of science, some types of art/graphics &
music) would presumably be too large except for data centres.