Historical Usenet Archives & Statistics

Historical Usenet archives and statistics make interesting grounds for virtual exploration.

Google maintains the most complete Usenet archive with postings available from the present back to the early 1980's. This invaluable collection contains an historically fascinating set of archives, including early newsgroups in the "net" and "fa" (from ARPANET) hierarchies, such as the famous human-nets and sf-lovers lists. Some particularly memorable postings of early "firsts" are collected here.

The UUNET Archive also maintains an historical Usenet archive with postings from the "comp" and "rec" hierarchies from 1996.

Statistics. The following sites maintain historical Usenet traffic statistics:

• Arbitron Usenet Statistics -- Jan 1995 to June 1995

• BTnet Usenet Historical Statistics -- Archive, only some links work

• Citron.nl Usenet Statistics -- Jan 1997 to July 1997 (thanks to Edvard Tuinder)

• Millennianet.com Usenet Statistics -- Dec 1996 to Apr 1997

• Top 1000 Usenet Sites 1995-2001

• UC Berkeley Usenet Reports & Stats -- 1996 to 1999.

Current Usenet traffic statistics can be found here.

Historical index. An archived index to old newsgroup archives stored on the Internet around the world can be found at Cameron Laird's page below, interesting mainly for historical purposes. Many links are broken or inaccessible, and even if you can access them some archives are stored in a binary form which need to be decompressed before they can be read.

• Cameron Laird's "Where is the archive for newsgroup X?".