https://olduse.net/

olduse.net

2025 - going on

2025 has come and I'll keep olduse.net going - and as has become
tradition - a new port with a years more delay has been added:

Port    Delay
11945 45 years

Keep having fun!

Adam Sjogren
2025-01-01

2024 - on continue

Every year olduse.net adds another port with another years delay on
it.

If I remember to restart the nntpd and update the port forwarding
setup in my router, that is.

Since we are up to 2024 now, you have 5 different delays with which
you can follow the beginning of usenet interactively:

Port    Delay
11940 40 years
11941 41 years
11942 42 years
11943 43 years
11944 44 years

(Note: it doesn't make sense to connect eg Leafnode to multiple
ports, you'll get the same articles, only with different delays.)

Have fun!

Adam Sjogren
2024-01-01

Extended replay

olduse.net was mentioned in a thread on the fediverse recently. I
couldn't help but reply with information about the current status. To
my surprise restarting the replay was mentioned.

I hadn't thought about that. But why not? I have all the articles in
a database, I could extract the Date: into a column, index it, and do
some SQL to find every article more than 40 years old. From there the
road isn't long to implementing a custom nntp daemon to serve it.

During the implementation I realized that I could easily expose a 40
year delayed archive on one port, a 41 year delayed archive on
another port, and so on, until the start of the archive (currently 42
years delayed).

So here we are:

Delay (years) Connect to (port) #groups #articles
40            olduse.net 11940  265     28640
41            olduse.net 11941  91      3933
42            olduse.net 11942  3       15

Point your Gnus, slrn, tin, Pan, Thunderbird, or even Lynx or ELinks
at any of those ports and enjoy another round of olduse.net!

Adam Sjogren
2022-12-09

Keeping olduse.net around

olduse.net was an interactive art installation conceived and
implemented by Joey Hess that ran from 2011 to 2021.

olduse.net was posting the first 10 years of archived usenet articles
to a news server, replaying usenet as it happened 30 years earlier.
It also had a web interface with an interactive news reader, allowing
you to access the news server via the web instead of using nntp.

When the project was announced I wanted a way to link to those old
articles on the web, so I borrowed some of Joey Hess' code and
implemented article.olduse.net, by shoveling the archive into a
database.

My service hasn't seen that much use, but it did get its own version
of "FSF-dotting", when the 30th anniversary of the GNU project
announcement was celebrated, and many sites linked to the original
article on article.olduse.net.

When the art project was over I still wanted article.olduse.net to
continue working, and Joey Hess was nice enough to transfer the
domain to me.

So here we are. Enjoy.

Adam Sjogren
2022-07-22