Well, Google has redeemed itself after the Deja takeover fiasco, and how. They’ve had much of USENET online for months now (it was quite a trip seeing my first posts — March 1994, many in alt.romance and alt.sex — what a dork!), but today, they announced essentially the entire twenty-year history of posts is now available. It’s humbling to see how much “net” there was before the web. At least I’ll be able to say I’m old enough to remember “The First Spam”: Laurence Canter’s green card lottery post.

 
The timeline is especially interesting. From a scoop on the third Star Wars movie (Jun. 1982), to a pretty damn good citation for the origins of emoticons (Nov. 1982), to the first mention of Yahoo! (Dec. 1994).

 
It almost makes the main part of Google’s announcement — that it’s database now holds more than three billion web documents — seem almost less than breathtaking.