Sure, the Wayback machine of archive.org is cool as it gives you a peek at how websites looked like way back, dating to the early 1990’s. But Google has something even better–Google Groups. Groups takes you back in time by enabling you to search for conversations in usenet mailing lists up to 1981. How cool is that?

By default, Google Groups also lets you create email discussion groups very much similar to Yahoo!’s popular yahoogroups. However, one advantage of Google is that it has indexed and converted its usenet discussion lists into Googlegroups. You can then use the advanced search function to define the date range of your query.

For instance, if you’re looking for discussions about “Windows” in the 1980’s you can click on advanced search, define the date range from January 1, 1981 to December 31, 1989, and then click search.

You will then get results like these:

It can be quite fun if you’ve been active in the usenet mailing list scene before web forums, blogs and e-groups became popular. You can even try doing vanity searches or “egosurfing” among the discussions, to see if something about you or from you comes up.