[TUHS] Old Usenet newsreader source code?

[henry.r.bent@gmail.com (Henry Bent)]

On 8 May 2018 at 18:32, Arthur Krewat <krewat at kilonet.net> wrote:

>
>
> On 5/8/2018 6:22 PM, Henry Bent wrote:
>
>> My father was the sysadmin for Deja News at the time they were bought by
>> Google.  I was told that the "buyout" consisted of some Google folks
>> showing up with a rack of drives, dumping all of Deja News's data over a
>> weekend, and then flying back out to Mountain View.
>>
>
> Where are the original drives? Or tapes? (insert devilish grin emoticon
> here)
>
> ak
>

I have no idea where they are now.  At the time they were in Austin, TX.  I
imagine that they probably just went to one of those many IT scrapyards,
the warehouses full of old parts that the owners sell on eBay.

About the same time - 2001? - when I was a student at Oberlin, an alumnus
who was working for mp3.com "donated" several full height racks of 2U
servers to the college.  Apparently the tax writeoff for donating the
servers was better than what they were going to get from the scrap folks,
and it all looked good on paper.   But the CS department had no idea what
to do with all of this hardware!   Remember that we were a small liberal
arts college, and that the entire department at that time was served by a
single DEC Alpha box.  So there was a free-for-all, everyone in the CS
department got to take as many machines as they had a use for (dual Pentium
III Intel boards, as I recall), which turned out to not make a significant
dent in the material we were given... The most astonishing part of the
whole experience was that mp3.com had not bothered to wipe the drives of
these machines, so they still booted to some variety of Linux (Red Hat?)
and were full of useless distributed data.

-Henry
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