So this could go in the history section but thought I'd plop it here first. Almost ten years ago, a fellow named Joey Hess took a USENET archive (10 years' worth, salvaged from the tapes stored by Henry Spencer in the U of Toronto Dept of Zoology) and set it up to feed real-time, starting from 1981. So it is now up to, of course, early 1990, with posts going back 60 days, and with the NeXT Computer & NextStep 1.0 having launched a year earlier, there is a goodly amount of traffic on comp.sys.next to view.
So point your favorite NNTP client to nntp.olduse.net and browse through USENET in its glory days! (Personally I'm using Alexandra
from
http://www.nextcomputers.org/NeXTfiles/Software/NEXTSTEP/Apps/Internet/News on my TurboColor, but have also been reading with Mozilla 1.17.3 on a Sun Sparcstation 20 running Solaris 8).
More info on the project at
http://olduse.netCheers!