Google have made the last 20 years of Usenet news available of searching.
Searching on your own name brings back some interesting things. In my case, things I’d forgotten about. It seems that in 1989 I was posting in comp.ai.neural-nets. In the first half of the 1990s I was spending a lot of time writing LaTeX macros, by 1995 I was worried about Pro*C and Oracle, but by 1996 everything was web related.
The first result from google for me is a posting to rec.pets. I had no idea what it was about, but a bit of digging revealed that some one in San Diego was offering to digitize pictures of a cat for me. In the days when scanners were not commonplace.
There’s a nice write up about what google have dug up from the archive.