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 Sjøgren
2022-12-09
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 Sjøgren
2022-07-22