Messages From the Past Offer a Glimpse of Electronic History
It didn’t take long after the capture of American Taliban John Walker Lindh before journalists were fanning out to learn more about this mysterious young man and how he went from a posh California suburb to a dingy Afghan prison.
In the end, some of the most tantalizing clues emerged not from family members and neighbors but from Lindh himself, in writings he had posted years ago on the Internet.
Specifically, reporters discovered these messages on Usenet, one of the oldest electronic forums for public discourse. Between 1995 and 1998, Lindh wrote dozens of messages there, often under the nickname “doodoo,” that document his transformation from a 14-year-old hip-hop devotee to a Muslim fanatic who dissed everything from Disneyland to Zion.
The episode underlines just how important sources such as Usenet are becoming to historians and others seeking to understand a generation whose thoughts are increasingly preserved not in traditional diaries or letters but in electrons.
Created in 1979, Usenet is now under the custodianship of the Google search service (groups. google.com), which had amassed an archive of more than 650 million Usenet messages dating to 1995. But recently, in a move that excited historians and techies alike, the company announced it had expanded its electronic vault by 50 million Usenet messages, pushing the archive back to 1981.
Like other projects such as the Internet Archive (archive.org), which has preserved more than 10 billion pages of the World Wide Web dating to 1996, the Usenet archive offers a chance to see life in the 1980s as filtered through the computer, and to trace the evolution of high-tech kingpins before they became well-known.
The archive contains the early postings and debates of technology pioneers such as Marc Andreessen, who helped popularize the Web browser and co-founded Netscape; Linus Torvalds, creator of Linux; and cyber-cryptography pioneer Philip Zimmermann, whose Usenet postings drew the attention of the FBI.
“If you’re going to write history from now on, you’re going to have to use it,” says Paul Ceruzzi, a Smithsonian curator and author of “A History of Modern Computing.” “You’ve got this enormous archive of day-to-day thoughts of people as they’re creating this modern technology.”
In the 1980s, the Internet was an exclusive club accessible only to government researchers and a small group of students in technical majors. Usenet was created by two Duke University grad students frustrated by the lack of an openly available public forum for kvetching. As such, it was the primitive ancestor of America Online, and ultimately the World Wide Web.
In the early years, Usenet was populated mostly by programmers and engineers who swapped bug fixes and technology tips. “If you had a question you didn’t have an answer to, you posted a message on Usenet,” recalls Kent Landfield, a Dallas programmer who first ventured onto Usenet in 1983. “And within a few hours, you often got your response.”
The earliest message in the Google Usenet archive, dated May 12, 1981, offers a taste of early electronic life: Posted by “sdcsvax!phil,” it’s a review of something called the Versatec V-80, an $8,500 device for producing “phototypesetter facsimiles.” Or in modern-speak: a printer.
But it wasn’t long before society and popular culture crept in. Chinese students in North America leapt onto Usenet in the 1980s to organize support for the pro-democracy movement back home. It’s where news of the notorious discovery of “cold fusion” first spread. The Google archive also contains early discussions of Madonna, the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger and AIDS.
“The disease sounds very frightening,” one man wrote in December 1982. “Seems like the public should be more aware of it. Anybody have any info on it?”
Surprisingly few of these early Usenet messages were still online. So Google put out a call for help from Usenet old-timers. Word reached people like Henry Spencer, a 46-year-old computer scientist in Toronto, who had kept reels of half-inch computer tape moldering away in his office, each stuffed with old Usenet messages. Contributors from the United States to Germany also sent Google their old tapes and CDs.
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Michael Stroh is a reporter for the Baltimore Sun, a Tribune company.
