Sifting thru old news

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1 total messages Started by Bruce Jones Tue, 07 Apr 1992 17:47

Author: Bruce Jones
Date: Tue, 07 Apr 1992 17:47

44 lines
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I posted the following reply in news.admin and, as a result, someone
suggested that I repost it here.

In article <1992Apr4.030956.4996@iWarp.intel.com> merlyn@iWarp.intel.com (Randal L. Schwartz) writes:
>
>IMMINENT DEATH OF USENET PREDICTED.
>
>[again. :-]
>
>(Who has that post that codified this phrase, with the history of
>Usenet from day 2 onward, including the uses of this phrase?  

I "probably" have this article/post.  Several months ago I received
12 full magtapes of news from 1982 to 1986 or so from the good folks
at CFRI/Toronto and have been busily and happily rooting around in
the files ever since.  The problems of sorting thru all this news
however are more daunting than I imagined.  There's 2gb of news
there and I have about 160mb of diskspace to use to sort it.  This
is enough space to make a dd tape dump and run tar against it to
extract the files a few at a time (there's not enough inodes on this
machine to dump an old news tape with tar).  

What I need is some kind of search engine/"knowbot" that I could
prime with a few, well-chosen words/strings that would run with
tar as the primary extraction utility and find the appropriate
articles.  (Does this make any sense? I'm not too sure of my terms
here.)  Given that my programming experience is limited to writing
shell scripts, I'd appreciate some advice/help from those of you
out there who know a bit about awk and C.  Anyone have any advice
or programs that I could use or modify to find articles about
specific things?  If so, and I can locate the articles in the
database, I'd be happy to repost them somewhere where others can
see/retrieve them.

Anyone out there care to see the first use of the smiley face or the 
article, mentioned above, where the phrase "iminent death of the net 
predicted"  was first used?

Bruce Jones 			Graduate Program in Communication
bjones@ucsd.edu/bitnet		University of California, San Diego
(619) 534-0417/4410		9500 Gilman Drive
FAX (619) 534-7315		La Jolla, Ca. 92093-0503

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