Post by Rohit D'AlmeidaWhat 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.