Rusty is right (or is that "Rusty is Wright"?)
- we have ALL in our .ngfile so I tend to forget
this. ALL.ALL may or may not work, but
ALL certainly does. Mark

Then, the ancient Internet scribe added this ominous postscript:

I plan to make the change on Tuesday
unless something horrible happens.

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Horton's message was a response to a previous post, the intact original of which is now lost to history, from one "sdcarl!rusty," aka Rusty Wright. With this incomplete fragment of a cryptic exchange, the history of Usenet, as we have it today, begins.

The message is the oldest Usenet posting in the 20-year archive, now searchable on Google. It's the first of some 700 million posts that provide a record spanning the early history to the present of Usenet -- the sprawling public bulletin board, composed of a vast hierarchy of newsgroups, that grew up alongside the Internet itself.

Granted, this message doesn't exactly have the ever-quotable and historic ring of Alexander Graham Bell braying on the first telephone call, "Mr. Watson. Come here. I need you." But it's not the first Usenet message ever -- it's just the first one captured in this vast, yet still incomplete, archive of Usenet's 35,000 topic categories. It's an ordinary exchange between two of the first few hundred denizens of Usenet posting back in 1981.

Still, if you squint, you can see glimmers of what's to follow in this poignant gem of a fragment. What are these geeks talking about, anyway? It's a meta-post about the system itself, of course! It's part of a technical discussion of how Usenet should be administered. And catch that corny play on words, goofing off Rusty's last name: "or is that 'Rusty is Wright'?"

Geeks talking amongst themselves on Usenet about how Usenet should best be run, while having fun with homonyms: Almost 20 years later, has anything really changed?

In mid-December 2001, Google unveiled its improved Usenet archives, which now go more than a decade deeper into the Net's past than did the millions of posts that the company salvaged from DejaNews. Now on a browser near you: a glimpse of the prehistory of the Net culture we all take for granted today. The first "me too" post! The first "Make-Money-Fast" post! It's enough to make even a relative newbie nostalgic for a past she never experienced firsthand.

The debut of the archive touched off a flurry of chatter among the geeks on Slashdot, some of whom had been there back in the day. There were some grumbles. Imagine what it's like to see your flames from 15 years ago, when Usenet still had the population of a small town, now searchable by anyone on the Web.

"Glad I've changed my e-mail address since those long, (best) forgotten days. It wasn't me, I swear," joked one poster to Slashdot. Another one griped: "It's like having naked baby pictures of yourself stapled to your forehead when you walk around." (Google vows that at the author's request, they'll delete old posts; so if you want to be the Internet equivalent of a rare-book burner, go right ahead.)

Google gets the credit for making these relics of the early Net accessible to anyone on the Web, bringing the early history of Usenet to all. Michael Schmidt, 29, a Google software engineer, spent the last year and a half playing detective, trying to track down the Internet's lost history: "It was a long and painful investigative process. I was searching on the Web, calling people. There were a lot of dead ends."

But it was the geeky pragmatism and historical foresight of Usenet old-timers themselves that actually saved the early history of the newsgroups so that we can all poke around in it today. These "archive donors," whom Google thanks here, gave their copies of the millions of messages they'd saved back to the Net.

The tale of how early Usenet was saved begins with one of the Net's great old-timers: Henry Spencer. "Henry Spencer is the real hero, because his contributions are what makes this historic," says Schmidt. "Back in the Stone Age of the Internet, he was already archiving this stuff, and he was the only one doing it."

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