For the Record
I can clearly remember sitting at my desk in
the Research Activities Building on the engineering campus of the University
of Michigan back in 1988 posting to USENET from a trusty old Apollo Domain
workstation. Apollo lost the
workstation battle to Sun and was absorbed by Hewlett-Packard in 1989. The
building where I shared an office was demolished in 1989 to make way for a
shiny new one with a nice green
lumpy lawn. I graduated and began the
process of forgetting most of what I learned. Little did I know that it would
be my USENET posts that would outlast pretty much everything else.
In 2001 Google acquired Deja.com (aka DejaNews). When they did so they brought online and indexed Deja's entire USENET archive, dating back to 1981. It turns out that archive contained pretty much everything I'd ever written online. It's more than a little strange and just a bit embarassing to have nearly twenty years of material suddenly surface when you'd assumed it had all floated off into electronic space long ago. I won't make that mistake again.
To anyone reading this blog in 2026, please ignore everything I wrote from 1986 to 2005 or so. I had no idea what I was talking about.