Before Reddit, before Twitter, before the web itself — there was Usenet. Created in 1979, it was the internet's first global discussion system: a decentralized network of "newsgroups" where millions of people debated, shared knowledge, made history, and shaped the culture of the early internet.
Linus Torvalds announced Linux on Usenet. Tim Berners-Lee unveiled the World Wide Web here. Richard Stallman launched the GNU Project with a Usenet post. The first flame wars, the first FAQs, the first online communities — they all started on Usenet.
We are one of the most extensive free Usenet archives on the internet, preserving hundreds of millions of posts spanning over four decades of digital history — from 1980 to the present.
Our mission is simple: preserve and make accessible this irreplaceable record of human thought, technical innovation, and cultural evolution. Every post you read here is an original artifact, stored exactly as it was written.
You can search by author, subject, or content across tens of thousands of newsgroups. Browse threads chronologically. Discover famous people who posted on Usenet or read the historic posts that changed the world.
UsenetArchives.com is built and maintained by Jozef Jarosciak, an enterprise architect with a passion for internet history and digital preservation. What started as a personal project has grown into one of the largest free Usenet archives available today.
Running an archive of this scale isn't cheap — hundreds of millions of posts require serious infrastructure. If you find this resource valuable, consider supporting us on Patreon. Our generous patrons help keep the servers running and the archive growing.
For inquiries, contact us.
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