information archeology

I was reading Stef's blog on Whitelabel.org and noticed that he written about the earliest recorded instance of him online. A few days ago I was writing about an idea of information archeology for local disks. So this idea intrigued me it is a different kind of hunting, your sources are the transient mailing lists and bulletin board archives. Local file systems are still interesting, but you kind of know what is there, online you need to think of ancient email addresses and the mailing lists you used to belong to and hope they still exist. google is good for it, but there maybe better tools that understand the content you are hunting through.
So, I decided to hunt out my first evidence too, I was in final year at Queen's University in Belfast and had just discovered the internet. It must have been in late 92, the university got a load of DEC 3100 machines running Ultrix. This was as part of a deal to replace the VAX9000 we had and I think they arrived in time for the start of term in September.
The world of gopher, telnet sessions, CU-SeeMe, mailing lists and ftp sites was wide open for me. I joined Future Culture and lurked for a while, then the topic of what are you wearing came up, a very easy delurking topic. I was a bit of a scruff so it seems.
It is odd to meet oneself 10 years on, I think I've changed quite a bit, though I still have that grey fleece and it is still too big for me. A year later in 94, I was niavely looking at information architecture type research, had helped setup www.qub.ac.uk and was off to WWW94 with George.
Looking back can give you a strange feeling, memories keep returning of things, people and places, as well as the greats, what ifs and maybes. Still it is nice to have an excuse to do it and it has been a laugh.