Usenet With a 30 Year Lag 102
Posted
by
CmdrTaco
from the deja-what-now dept.
from the deja-what-now dept.
joey writes "The early A-News days of Usenet are being played out on olduse.net in realtime with a 30 year time delay. You can catch up on what rms and Postel are doing, Keep informed of the latest prices in disk drives ($75000 per gigabyte), and more. Available through a web-based teletype or NNTP. I plan to run the service for the next ten years, until 1991."
My Mind is Officially Blown (Score:5, Interesting)
Besides a 30-year reverse time warp we have a recursive link. That's deep. Too deep for a Monday really...
Re:Ending it in 1991... (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm ending it when my archive ends. If google or someone wants to donate more material I'll consider running it further.
I'd like to get to 1994 myself, so I can read my own 1st post.
Had a similar idea, but with political news (Score:4, Interesting)
I've been thinking for the last decade or two that it would be interesting to do something like this, but on a shorter scale, such as 1-2 years, and using a source for political and world news that's as neutral as possible. That way, we can be reminded of things that are mostly still relevant, yet later got spun away, swept under the rug, or outright discredited. In particular, It'd be less of a novelty and more of a useful tool in refreshing our collective memory. I think it'd be especially useful in two situations:
1) It's easy to say that "X was a bad decision" after the fact, especially since parties are eager to blame the other side and someone always has to take the blame for things that go wrong, but if we see the events as they play out, sometimes those "obvious" bad decisions actually end up being good field decisions that were well-founed based on the information available at the time.
2) When we find out that someone in authority was lying to us over an extended period of time, those sorts of scandals are often downplayed in the media and swept under the rug quickly, meaning that they're forgotten and implicitly excused when we get distracted by something else. But if we re-watch the lies and see them as they played out, we'll be reminded of exactly how long and hard the lie was repeated without the coloration that later spin applied to it.
Imagine the public accountability that something like this could create. Imagine if the memory of the mob didn't last a mere five minutes, but instead lasted for years. Imagine how people's priorities would change when they're shown ephemeral things that they thought were world-shatteringly important at the time, but were really not that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things. Imagine how PR and spin would change if they had the knowledge that it would all be dredged up again later. Imagine how casual political discussion would change if the rose colored glasses were removed in such a manner. Imagine how much more consensus we could reach when we're all reminded of the original facts, rather than the spin and interpretation that happened after.
Ehh...I can dream, but I'm not kidding anyone, even myself. While I'd love to see something like that, there's no way it'd ever see its full potential.