From: jbn@forestfield.org   
      
   Rohit D'Almeida  wrote:   
   > What I'm more curious is.... how is it possible that the first post   
   > here (and the other few) show a date of the year 1992?? The internet   
   > wasn't fully commercialized until 1995 in the States as far as my   
   > knowledge goes.   
      
   The Internet and Usenet (news groups we're using now) aren't the same   
   thing. I'd guess that most people access Usenet groups via the   
   Internet now but that wasn't always the case.   
      
   The Internet was in use by some institutions (including some large   
   American corporations and universities) prior to 1995. Usenet was in   
   use prior to the popularization of the Internet in the mid-1990s. I   
   recall seeing Usenet newsgroups in the late 1980s (about a decade   
   after it started) and early 1990s.   
      
   Anyone with a message-ID of an old post can create a followup to that   
   post, no matter how old the parent post is, merely by including the   
   old message-ID in the References: header. Users with particularly huge   
   caches of old articles will be able to properly thread such new posts.   
   You might not be able to go back decades on your news server but other   
   news servers could have more old articles than your news server   
   does. There are limits on article numbering which are being addressed   
   in discussions about NNTP but that's another issue to take up   
   elsewhere.   
      
   I don't know of any news server offering old posts (even on a   
   read-only basis) via NNTP. But it would be interesting to use modern   
   newsreaders on such a server and see old posts again.   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)