In 2015, I began looking for archives of networked BBS messageboards, hoping to find contemporary discussions of BBS door games from the 1990s. The best source I found was the fidonet.ozzmosis.com archive.
The Ozzmosis archive is awesome — and it’s still active, archiving any new messages posted to Fidonet. (yes, Fidonet still exists!) But I quickly realized the archive was heavily weighted to the new millenium. I put my data journalism skills to work, analyzing the dates of every message in the Ozzmosis archive. I found that only 7% of the archive was from years prior to 2000.
That realization set me on a search. I began visiting long-running BBSes, looking for caches of old Fidonet messages.
