Minix Archives on WWW

last rev 18 May 2006

The minix-l mailing list is archived, and the archives are available over the World Wide Web. The archives are extremely up-to-date, since they are handled at the same site as the mailing list, they go back to the beginning of January 1991, which covers a lot of Minix history, and the web page provides for searching the archives.

To access the minix-l archives: http://listserv.nodak.edu/archives/minix-l.html.

As of August 2004 the minix-l list is readable through the gmane.org mail-to-news gateway service as http://news.gmane.org/gmane.os.minix.general. Gmane maintains a searchable archive of the lists it gateways. At the time of writing (Aug 2004) there is little in the archive and thus little to search, but this may become a useful alternative way to search minix-l in the future.

The comp.os.minix newsgroup used to be coupled to the minix-l mailing list, and until about 1995 almost everything posted to the newsgroup was also mailed to mailing list subscribers, so the mailing list archive will also list older items posted to the newsgroup. Warren Toomey maintains a current archive site for the newsgroup. It is up-to-date, but not easily searched, articles are kept in gzip files holding 100 articles each.

To access the comp.os.minix archives: ftp://minnie.tuhs.org/minix/news.

Google (revised May 2006)

Google has archives of a large number of usenix newsgroups, including comp.os.minix. The URL is http://groups.google.com/group/comp.os.minix.

Google is my favorite search engine, and it works very well for searching newsgroup archives. The interface has been improved since I created this page several years ago. I used to prefer reading news the old-fashioned way (using the tin newsreader on a Unix command line interface, if you must know). Usenet is not as widely used as it used to be, and the University of Massachusetts is planning to discontinue providing news. Hampshire College and other small colleges in this area got their feeds from UMass, and it's not sure that another source will be found, so this has encouraged me to use Google more often. I've found the Google interface to be very convenient, now that I am accustomed to using it. I particularly like the fact that postings seem to propagate to Google very rapidly and it is very easy to take a quick look at the newsgroup on Google and see which threads have had new posts recently.

If you haven't had much experience with newsgroups (or even if you have), I recommend the Wikipedia article on Google Groups. It explains features that may be new to those who are used to reading newsgroups using a text-based news server.

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