[ih] Really old list archives Was: google groups going away feb 22

[Noel Chiappa]

    > From: Grant Taylor

    > It's Google. The king of discontinuing things when it suits
    > them.

Complaining that a company acts like a company is like complaining that lead
doesn't float. (Yes, I know there are exceptions, on both sides - the
Myth-Busters even once made a real lead balloon; but they _are_ exceptions.)


While I'm posting, does anyone know if the old 'internet working group' email
list archives are available anywhere? I don't mean the list that was digested
in the "TCP/IP Digest"s - that was a completely separate list. And I don't
mean the original international network working group; that, AFAIK, never had
a email list. I'm talking about the email list that people working on the
DARPA TCP/IP project used; I think it eventually morphed into the IETF list.

Anyone remember what the address for it was? (I looked in some Internet
Meeting Notes, etc, in the IEN's, but did not see it referred to.)

And speaking of the IETF list, I wonder how far back the online archives go.
The user interface to the archives, at:

  https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/browse/ietf/

doesn't seem to have any way to look at the oldest messages in that archive.
Needless to say, the IETF list messages from the pre-WG era would be an
incredible resource for historians, if we can locate them; ditto for the
internet working group email messages.

We might have to trudge through old backup tape collections in archives to
find them, though. Does anyone know which institutions from that era still
have backup tapes? MIT does, and I might be able to retrieve _some_ of my old
email from there, which may still retain _some_ messages to those lists.
(When disks were small, a lot of email was ditched as soon as it was read.)
SAIL has a very good archive, but I'm not sure if anyone at SAIL was involved
in the early Internet work.

   Noel