User talk:Sounddoctorin

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Hi.

Regarding your comments on Usenet; there's probably a more prosaic explanation for them being missed.

The Usenet archives acquired by Google came from multiple sources; they cover the full history of the net, but aren't a complete record before 1990. The archives for 1981-1990is come from a single source, Henry Spencer in Toronto, who did it partly as a hobby but partly for professional reasons; as Usenet grew and grew, it became uneconomical for him to record everything, so he started to cut back on certain groups (and later certain hierarchies).

So some groups, mostly technical ones, are reasonably complete (maybe a few % of posts missing - transmission was always iffy in those days) throughout the timeframe, whilst at the other end of the spectrum some groups are virtually unrecorded, with all that got through being a few sparse posts crossposted to a newsgroup that was recorded (or just archived by accident, or because spare capacity was available that week).

It's a real pity, in many ways - we've lost this vast corpus of sociopolitical discussion from the time, which would be invaluable to researchers now but then just seemed to be idle chatter and bickering. I strongly suspect that talk.religion.* was in his "not important" list - indeed, I suspect talk.* in general was the first hierarchy to go. It's certainly not just that newsgroup, though - compare the pattern of recorded posts in talk.abortion, talk.religion.misc, talk.politics.misc to see the effects of the flaky early archives... Shimgray | talk | 16:50, 9 February 2007 (UTC)