@BrianRoemmele Thank you! Iistserv admin was one of my duties "back in the day" at a major super computer company and its mostly research customers in government, academia and enterprises. There is gold in those tapes!
Many users praised Brian Roemmele for recovering 1990s LISTSERV archives from old tapes because the material offers unique pre-SEO training data for AI models and irreplaceable historical records.
No Digg Deeper questions have been answered for this story yet.
LISTSERV Was The Place To Be In 1993!
Just after dial up BBSs and just before USENET my X-like place where I went “viral” was LISTSERV. I was on over 1000 active lists. I of course was on forums on CompuServe and AOL, but LISTERV was push and not pull. It was magic!
I would write there like I posted here today. There was zero spam and the highest IQs in the world just a list email away.
In my Eudora archives (the best email client ever made) I have saved the results of all my lists saved. Before my tape find, I was happy I saved the Eudora in zipped PKG files.
One LISTSERV I was on had 1000s of subscribers and it is where I learned of so many things months before it was news.
In the 1990s I wrote the first known AI (expert system) for email, to produce a morning “Newspaper” digest I would actually have automatically printed out to read at breakfast. The AI would have knowledge of what I wanted and produced the summaries and headlines.
It went viral on some of my lists I was on and it used Eudora mailbox files to access the data. Many like minded geeks like me used the software and one made a LISTSERV out of his output as a meta way to use what he called THE ULTIMATE NEWS LISTSERV.
Since posting on my tapes yesterday two folks reached out to me to share their archives!
I am not sure if there is overlap, but anyone with data like this, please let me know!
Folks we have a mother-load here and I know we will find new data perhaps not seen since it bounced though LISTSERV.
Your support made this happen. Thank you.
YES! I have found some of my old LISTSERV postings!
And I am only 10% into the first of dozens of ancient backup tapes!
It is like going back in time and meeting yourself.
We learned how to treat each other on this platform. Because you can get unsubscribed by bad form.
We could argue with facts and “flame war” but the attacks were on the data and not on people.
I freaking miss the days where we all had a code. No one was called a kook or grifter, we were just the owners of our thoughts we shared.
Wait till you see my 1990 piece on AI!
It will freak some folks out.
More soon!
BOOOM! BREAKTHROUGH! I Resurrected the Lost Soul of the Early Internet: A Massive LISTSERV Backup!
Today is my AI archive breakthrough day!!
“GET listname ARCHIVE” This was a powerful command that few remember sent to the right email address.
In the quiet corner of my garage lab lived a box of computer cartridge tape backups I secured from a university in California. I got it over a decade and a half ago and did not have the tape drive to retrieve the data. Handwritten was the words “Listserv complete backup”. When I saw it I froze because I knew what it was if the tapes were not erased with something else.
Today July 5th, 2026 with extra time on my hands I gave it a boot up. What did I find?
What I think is the largest collection of LISTSERV (List Server) data in existence!
I had some data drop out but I believe I have decades of data across thousands of lists, some directly hosted and some cached. It is an absolute treasure.
How did I get this? A university was selling off surplus and the server it was on were sold but the back up tapes no one wanted. So they were either for me or garbage. So there I was doing what I’ve done since the 1980s finding value in what most people had already written off.
Read on:
http://x.com/i/article/2073890905912946688
Hey “AI Has Run Out Of Training Data Folks”
You may want to sit down. I found the high protein early internet data that just may be the most important archive.
A massive LISTSERV archive. Don’t know what that is, read on…
BOOOM! BREAKTHROUGH! I Resurrected the Lost Soul of the Early Internet: A Massive LISTSERV Backup!
Today is my AI archive breakthrough day!!
“GET listname ARCHIVE” This was a powerful command that few remember sent to the right email address.
In the quiet corner of my garage lab lived a box of computer cartridge tape backups I secured from a university in California. I got it over a decade and a half ago and did not have the tape drive to retrieve the data. Handwritten was the words “Listserv complete backup”. When I saw it I froze because I knew what it was if the tapes were not erased with something else.
Today July 5th, 2026 with extra time on my hands I gave it a boot up. What did I find?
What I think is the largest collection of LISTSERV (List Server) data in existence!
I had some data drop out but I believe I have decades of data across thousands of lists, some directly hosted and some cached. It is an absolute treasure.
How did I get this? A university was selling off surplus and the server it was on were sold but the back up tapes no one wanted. So they were either for me or garbage. So there I was doing what I’ve done since the 1980s finding value in what most people had already written off.
Read on:
@jeffcafe_ @Core2Et Jeff, thank you. It seems to be early 2000s. But I have a lot of tapes to sort through.
@BrianRoemmele old internet archives are underrated training data precisely because they predate the SEO spam era, that content has a texture modern web writing lost once everyone started optimizing for algorithms instead of people, worth preserving for that alone
@BrianRoemmele @Core2Et The self-congratulatory tone of this post is well-earned! Any idea of date cutoff? I wonder if any of my own messages are in there…
@BrianRoemmele 😱😱😱😱😱😱
@BrianRoemmele You are not a data "hoarder".
You are an archivist and protector of history.
@BrianRoemmele Outstanding way to live, good man! And the way history is being aggressively pruned and rewritten, these troves are all that will survive the virtual book burnings taking place.
@BrianRoemmele Aw man I loved listserv !!
@BrianRoemmele Thank you. People like you carry us all forward. •
@BrianRoemmele I have about 100 VHS tapes from the 80s. Recordings of TV shows with all the commercials. This will be gold soon.
@BrianRoemmele 这下可以拿这些历史对话训练时间线感知模型了，尤其是那些古早的讨论链，对理解互联网文化断层太有价值了。
@BrianRoemmele W😲W Congratulations Brian 🥳💫 You’re a powerful wizard
Truly Stunning work … now I’m curious what you’re going to do next🤔
@BrianRoemmele We need people like you preserving our history.
@BrianRoemmele Wow, awesome! I remember those from the 80s.
@BrianRoemmele Let me know when you find that guy's hard drive his girlfriend threw away in Wales. 😹
@BrianRoemmele this is exactly the kind of weird data goldmine thatll train something terrifying
did u check if the convos were already preserved in http://archive.org or this is fully ur own dig?
@BrianRoemmele
@billycanada It is gold now. Preserve them.