So who is the oldest 'old hand' here then?

Including those long gone altogether ...

The earliest post of mine that Google can find in uk.d-i-y is also from

I think I didn't start until about 2000. I know it was when our washing machine broke and I needed advice. We got that machine in 1994 when our first child was born, and I know the bearings went after about six years!

OTOH....my first posting on Usenet was in 1983...

The earliest post of mine I can find dates back to November 1995 virtually 20 years - scary!

Bob

I wish I still had a good memory to remember!:-((

First post I can find via google is from 2000 when I was still with zetnet. Lurking before that on dial-up.

Not as scary as remembering that having a 1200/1200 modem was seen as having a unfair advantage over those with 1200/75 modems in online role playing games.

On 28 Mar 2015, Chris French grunted:

I can trump that, as actually it was me that originally instigated the creation of the newsgroup - I can date that event to 1992-95, as I remember where I was working at the time. I used to post a lot in uk.misc in those days, and was also spending a huge amount of time doing up my then house - there was quite a lot of diy-related traffic in uk.misc and it struck me as being a good idea to create the dedicated newsgroup.

So yes, the oft-derided hyphenation of the newsgroup name, and its position in the uk.heirarchy, is all down to me! To be fair, though, it all went through the correct uk.news newsgroup creation procedures, with RFDs and RFCs and voting etc and whatever else (all of which is a hazy memory now), and there were only a small handful of uk.* groups in existence back then.

Just been having a root around the bowels of the internet to find any archived stuff from the very early days of the newsgroup, but sadly I can't find anything.

The diyfaq wiki says "end of 1994" and the earliest message dejagoogle have kept is from December 1994

I think we have an undisputed winner here...

Not sure if I can trump that or not. I had an ARPAnet email address and access to Usenet from a job I did from June 1981 to March 1984. I was working for Xerox at the time.

Just over 14yrs to the day (at least with this client and id.)

The earliest I can find from me was 24/06/94

Chris

Google finds posts from late 99 but I know I was on usenet a lot earlier than that. You used to be able to search the google archive with a date range and poster information have they screwed that up as well?

I can't remember if cix allowed posting into usenet or only it's forums/groups. If not I'd have not been on usenet until I got 'net access in June 1992 as a founder member of Demon Internet.

I seem to remember Fred Flintstone used to be on here. He was always having damp problems in his cave, that sort of thing.

Bill

The Bruce Forsyth of d-i-y

My first USENET posting was in the early hours of 12 July 1999 a few hours after viewing my first webpage and creating my first email account. Here it is:

Realising that posting a test message in a live group was not the best idea, my second post (ALL IN UPPER CASE incidentally) was to ask how I could remove the first!

Cringe? I certainly am.

I very quickly realised that uk.radio.amateur was not for me and I don't think I have made any other contributions to that group.

I got my first V22 bis modem sometime in '88 IIRC. Had BBS / Fidonet access then, but not internet and usenet til about '95. Google can find my old posts in some of the groups from then - but it seems to have a rather patchy memory for anything in uk.d-i-y more than a couple of years old. I would guess my first posts here were sometime late '90s or very early 2000's

Ah, that "before:" technique yields some of my posts from 2002.