Usenet-Rewind opens a search window into 45 years of newsgroup history
Usenet rewind archive search engine
Usenet-Rewind is a research archive that lets you search text posts from Usenet newsgroups spanning 1981 to the present. With over 1 billion messages and counting, it preserves early tech support threads, scientific debates, hobbyist communities, and firsthand accounts of internet history. The site also offers a decade-by-decade view of topics, people, and events.
Search Usenet newsgroup archives — text posts from 1981 to present.
- vinc
You can visit only 25 pages on the website with a free account, that's a bit too limiting. I'd suggest limiting the number of searches maybe but not the pagination over the results.
I got curious again to find my old posts and figured I could download and grep the mbox files from Internet Archive instead.
- msephton
Just found some cool old stuff thanks to this:
1996-01-17: first post! a reply to a thread in alt.music.bjork
1996-03-11: first mention of my website/homepage
No links to avoid my own embarrassment.
- kingrolo
Ah this has reminded me of dejanews.com the usenet archive. Before the days of Stack Overflow that was absolute gold for looking up an error message or code issue.
If I remember rightly Google bought the data when they shutdown and incorporated it into Google Groups.
- rfarley04
Oh my god this is a lifesaver. Just last week I was using Google Groups to search for old Usenet posts about the Commodore 64 and the Mimic Spartan, and I was getting "too many requests" errors 4 out of 5 times clicking a result. Happened on VPN+incognito, and in a separate browser. Just searched for what I was looking for in Rewind and immediately found the posts and even some I never saw in Google Groups results. So glad all of this is archived in multiple, non Google places
- fros1y
Logistically, these collections usually exclude alt.binaries traffic entirely. I often wonder if there are enough obsessive collectors out there to piece together an archive from ancient tapes and hard drives.