Nice Toronto Star article on the packrat at the University of Toronto's Zoology department who preserved the only archive of Usenet's early days, from 1981 on, which now forms the cornerstone of Google's deep historical database of Internet history.
"It was as much an accident as it was deliberate intent," Spencer said in an interview. "My collection came about more through inertia than anything else. Once we'd gotten the tape-archiving stuff organized it was just a matter of time of finding space for the tapes in the tape rack."
By 1991, the space crunch had become a major problem. Spencer was forced to become much more selective in his archiving, only saving Unix-related posts. But by then, other archivists were logging the Usenet, contributing to the 700 million messages, covering the past 20 years, which Google now has.
(Thanks, Amanda!)
