[ih] Chat room and forum archives

[Dan York]

On Aug 31, 2022, at 9:27 PM, Paul Ferguson via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org<mailto:internet-history at elists.isoc.org>> wrote:

FWIW, this topic/thread made me seek-and-find some old cypherpunk archive threads I had contributed to from an old FIDOnet gateway account. FIDO was really big in the amateur BBS community prior to the early 90's and the commercial availability of 'the Internet'. :-)

Ah, FIDOnet… I remember it well!  A friend operated a BBS and was connected out via FIDOnet to the wider world.

But back to Bob’s question:

On Aug 31, 2022, at 6:53 PM, Bob Purvy via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org<mailto:internet-history at elists.isoc.org>> wrote:

The Wayback Machine seems to have started at the end of 1996. Does anyone
have links to earlier archives?

As others have noted, there wasn’t much of the Web to archive before 1995/1996, since the Web had only started a few years earlier.

I don’t know if anyone ever archived much of gopher space. And the proprietary walled gardens of CompuServe, AOL, Prodigy, etc., were exactly that… walled gardens under the control of their owners. I doubt there are major archives of those.

I’ve heard the WELL has archives going back to the 1980s… but you’d have to pay to get access: https://www.well.com/

DejaNews was the first I recall trying to make a comprehensive archive of USENET newsgroups. They started in 1995 but at one point I recall they were actively going back to retrieve earlier postings and add them to their archive. They were bought by Google who eventually merged that all into Google Groups.

However, the archives seem to live on in Google Groups via https://groups.google.com - If you can make the right combination of UI choices, you can get back into early USENET groups.

Reaching back into the crevices of my mind to remember some of the groups I used to follow, I was able to work my way back in alt.tv.babylon-5 to February 1993 - https://groups.google.com/g/alt.tv.babylon-5/search?q=after%3A1985-08-07%20before%3A1993-07-09

Going back into those archives could possibly help give you some flavor for your character. (Well, maybe not the B5 group, but some of the other ones of that era.)

Hope some of that helps,
Dan