In article >,
Janet Wilder > wrote:

> Dan Abel wrote:

> > Back in the bad old days, access to newservers was very tightly
> > controlled. People were always asking, and the answer was always the
> > same, you have to pay. That was at least one reason that people paid
> > for ISPs instead of free access. I believe that GoogleGroups was the
> > first free newsgroup access.
> >
>
> Didn't Google Groups take over for Deja News or was that just the archives?

I had forgotten about that. My remembrance, which isn't good, is that
Deju was archive only. You couldn't post through it. I think Google
was the same when they took it over. I think GoogleGroups came later.

http://www.google.com/intl/en/corporate/history.html

February 2001

"Our first public acquisition: Deja.com's Usenet Discussion Service, an
archive of 500 million Usenet discussions dating back to 1995. We add
search and browse features and launch it as Google Groups."

--
Dan Abel
Petaluma, California USA