This post is the first in a thread devoted to the history of some Usenet newsgroups. I will post thirteen more posts in this thread this weekend, most of which are summaries of results to date for the years 1980 to 1986 and for the hierarchies NET.*, net.*, fa.*, and mod.*. In the future, I hope to post such preliminary posts for the remaining years to date, and for the Big 8 hierarchies, if possible also to this thread. This post is primarily meant to ensure that people who want to select or kill the entire thread can easily do so. But since I have to post this post, I can also say something about sources, methods, sources, and the resulting website. SOURCES The first three stages of this project deal chronologically with 1980-86, 1987-93, and 1994-2002, more or less. So do the second three. The difference is that the first three are a "rough draft", based on an extremely restricted set of evidence, while the second three, if I ever manage to do them, will be based on a much richer body of sources. You can get a hint of the difference by contrasting the 1980-81 year summary, or the fa.* hierarchy summary, in this thread, with the other year or hierarchy summaries. The restricted set of evidence for this and the next two stages consists primarily of normative lists of newsgroups. Since early 1983, these lists have taken two major forms: Lists of Active Newsgroups, and Checkgroups Messages. For the period covered by this stage, the List of Active Newsgroups is *much* more informative than the Checkgroups Message, and I've preferred it wherever possible. There is a rough line of descent and precursors to the List of Active Newsgroups going back to December, 1981; I've considered some "list-like" materials that are earlier (and am posting most of these in this thread, the only source materials I'm so posting). The List of Active Newsgroups spawned an additional List of Moderators in late 1984, and because neither it nor the Checkgroups Message at that time indicated whether a group was moderated, I've incorporated the Lists of Moderators into my dataset for this stage. (This in turn makes it possible to track who moderated which groups, so I'll probably keep it up for stages two and three.) METHODS I've used these materials, most of which I've gotten from Google's archives (exceptions are noted where relevant), as follows. I've downloaded the so-called "original format" version of each post, and then used the "Concatenate Files" feature of BBEdit Lite 4.6 for Macintosh to consolidate the posts into quarterly packages (Lists of Active Newsgroups, or failing these, Checkgroups Messages in one package, Lists of Moderators in the other, for each quarter). I mention this because "Concatenate Files" is not perfectly reliable; I believe the only damage it's done to the files in question here is to insert a space at the beginnings of the second and subsequent posts, but I could be wrong. Anyway, I've then read through each list, noting every group it lists in a spreadsheet in Microsoft Excel 5.0a for Macintosh, using a set of symbols vaguely reminiscent of active files in INN: y for an unmoderated group and m for a moderated one; an additional g for a gatewayed group; brackets for any unusual circumstances (for example, [m] could mean the group is in the List of Moderators but not the List of Active Newsgroups, or it could, contrariwise, mean that it's in both but has no moderator); asterisk for any definite change (this added only when beginning the summaries). While noting each list I've been unable to *see* the previous one (which is why the asterisks are later), but of course I've been able to *remember* how it went to some extent. The spreadsheets, in turn, are my principal sources for the year and hierarchy summaries, although I did the year summaries first, and used them as additional tools (in a minor way) in doing the hierarchy summaries. In doing the year and especially the hierarchy summaries, I also dug around to varying degrees (usually in Google's archives); I've usually provided full details about other posts that contributed information only when those posts are relevant to several groups. The possibilities of human error, with these methods, are significant. Feel free to check my work, on the group of your choice, or if you're a diff wizard, on the whole lot. Almost everything's at Google, and everything's at my website (see below on that), so you certainly *can* check, and I'd appreciate knowing about any mistakes. SOURCES Most of my sources are these posts, detailed in the year summaries to follow. (I've used a bunch of 1987 lists in the mod.* and net.* summaries, but haven't yet written a 1987 year summary; the raw lists, however, are available at the website. It's worth mentioning that two of the 1987 Lists of Active Newsgroups I've used, for March 16 and April 1, have last-modified lines pointing to Jeff Forys, who is otherwise almost invisible in Google's archives.) I have, however, especially (but not only) in the historical rather than rawly chronological parts of the summaries, relied considerably on other works, which I'd like to mention here because I know I didn't consistently mention them in the posts that follow. The most important previous historical works on Usenet for my purposes were those by Ronda Hauben and Lee Bumgarner. Hauben's main relevant work is chapter 10 of the "e-book" by her and Michael Hauben titled . This chapter discusses the early history of Usenet, and manages to mention surprisingly many of the most interesting bits of information available when Hauben wrote. An appendix also provides independent evidence as to Google's handling of the early archive material from the University of Toronto, Google's main if not only source for the years covered here. The most recent version, dating to either October 15, 1995 or June 12, 1996, is available on the Web as plain text at . (The book's main home page is at , which is the recommended page to link to since lower filenames might hypothetically change.) Lee Bumgarner's relevant work is his "Great Renaming FAQ". As best I can tell, while he used previous writings to some extent, Bumgarner mainly wrote on the basis of comments from the people who were involved (originally a thread from comp.society.folklore; later, also comments sent to him and correspondence that resulted). I've used the FAQ very little in composing the actual posts in this thread, and I've corrected at least one mistake in it, but my understanding of the later part of the period, the part Hauben doesn't cover much, derives at root from Bumgarner's account. He did, to my knowledge, two main drafts. The first is the widely disseminated draft available, at its prettiest, at . The second is at the author's website, at , among other places. I normally mean the second draft where I refer to the FAQ (explicitly or not) in the posts that follow; I refer to "both versions" at least once. Speaking of vrx.net, then. I know of three major archives of materials related to Usenet's history. First: The most important archive is that compiled by Bruce Jones, whose own ostensible subject was an "ethnography" of Usenet, but who wound up doing tons of necessary work on history. He connected Google with the Toronto archives (after making the first year or so of those archives available himself for a long time; this is the "A-News Archive" I mention in some of these posts). He also organised a mailing list of many of the important early Usenet players, the Usenet.Hist mailing list, which lasted from 1990 to 1997, and which is both Hauben's and my own most important non-Usenet source. See for this list's HTMLised archives. For other materials Jones used to make available, you'll have to look elsewhere. Second: Henry Edward Hardy, author of a fairly elementary historical account of the nets (an important source for Bumgarner, but often unreliable), has archived lots of material, some of which derives from Bruce Jones, some of which doesn't. (In particular, he provides the first few years of the Usenet.Hist mailing list archive in plain text form, and he has digested the single biggest thread, comments on Brad Templeton's rough list of Usenet historical events, into a single object.) See . Hardy's own history is at . Third: Two significant excerpts from the Usenet.Hist archives seem to be the rest of what offers, besides the Great Renaming FAQ draft 1. Although I've used very few printed sources so far, I should mention some. Most important, while I've had relatively little reason to cite it directly, Janet Abbate's (Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press, c 1999) has been invaluable in filling in stuff I might've learnt years ago but didn't. Abbate is a serious historian whose approach is sort of socio-technological; that is, she discusses the technology of networks, but largely in relation to what the relevant people (individually and collectively) were trying to do, wanted to do, or wound up doing by accident. The book is short and reasonably readable, and I recommend it enthusiastically. Second, by John S. Quarterman (Digital Press, c 1990). This is an exhaustive account of networks of all kinds existing as of date of writing or prior to that date, which makes it in principle a *most* desirable book. But I've caught Quarterman in at least one definite error (see the NET.* post, sv NET.test) concerning Usenet - although he was a Usenet moderator in the early days, as his website boasts (see the mod.* post, sv mod.std.unix) - and I'm not confident in what he says about ARPAnet either, so ... ? But at the very least, his bibliography shows promise of being invaluable when I get to doing more thorough work; the bibliography related to Usenet is in pp. 272-275. A citation for the third printed source I should mention is one thing I did, anyway, get from Quarterman. When I first went looking in 1997 for lists of newsgroups, in order to do this project, I found one in a magazine, whose source I didn't note. It's in one of my spreadsheets as the "SF server", May 1983, but not in the summary posts, because the list is a list of active newsgroups at a server which turned out to be carrying only a small proportion of the official groups (along with a bunch of typo groups). Anyway, I strongly suspect the source is cited by Quarterman: "USENET: A Bulletin Board for UNIX Users" by Sandra L. Emerson, in , vol. 8, no. 10, October 1983, pp. 219-236. This brings me to excluded lists. As far as I know, two lists of newsgroups were posted to Usenet in the years covered in the following posts, which I didn't use here just as I didn't use (in my summaries) the San Francisco server's list. The first dates to June 6, 1983, and was posted by someone at a Bell Telephones site with a complaint about the number of typo groups; the second dates to March 5, 1984, and was posted by Henry Spencer, being the actual active file at that date for the University of Toronto's utzoo site, the source for the A-News and Google archives. I'm planning to use lists like these for the second set of stages of the research, in which I try to move beyond the "official" lists, but for this stage, the official lists are as much as I can handle. Both of these excluded lists (unlike the one Sandra Emerson printed) are available at my website, and not bundled into the quarterly packages. WEBSITE AND A THANK YOU Oh, yes, my website. or if your device of choice does DNS lookups wrong (it's not a criticism; some of mine do too) offer the spreadsheets (in comma-separated value form), the quarterly packages, and some of the other posts referred to below, as well as copies of the summary posts themselves, among other things. Finally, the reason I could bring this project even this far in 2001-2002, which I couldn't in 1997, is that Google has taken the trouble to put the Toronto and other archives up for public use at last. I think this move is unlikely to bring them significant profit, and predecessors consistently failed even to attempt it. At best, they get some publicity and goodwill from it; hence the frequent references by name in these posts, and hence my heartfelt thanks. May all this be some use. I've taken some trouble to be able to post this to Usenet, and not just dump it on my website, so I mean it when I say that I welcome contributions, comments, and criticisms. Joe Bernstein