Thirty years ago

16 and 17 March 2026

During the transition from Bunsenlabs Boron to just Debian Testing (which is now Forky) with Fluxbox, while copying old data to the new setup, in passing I noticed a directory called “ownartcl”, full path ~/d/internet/ownartcl . These are the contents. File names still in uppercase, 8+3, according to the old MSDOS conventions:

-r--r--r-- 1312 May 31  1995 PRTSPICH.TXT
-r--r--r-- 1380 May 31  1995 ZITKYKEN
-r--r--r-- 1219 Nov 11  1995 PORTBRAZ.TXT
-r--r--r-- 1257 Jan 31  1996 INTERMED
-r--r--r-- 1266 Mar 25  1996 MEONSEN.EN
-r--r--r-- 1588 Mar 25  1996 MEONSEN.NL
-r--r--r-- 1463 Jun 29  1996 VOLTOOID.TXT

My own articles? Published articles? Published where, when?

On Usenet, probably. Some I could still trace using Google Groups (which took over the Deja News archive, and for many years added new material to it; now no longer), others are unfindable.

As can be seen, they date from 1995 and 1996, so they’re quite a bit older than my domain rudhar.com, which started 2000-12-15T00:05:35Z, and they even predate my hesitating first attempts to set up a website under my then access provider knoware.nl’s domain.

Six were written by me, Ruud Harmsen, one wasn’t, the one about the Portuguese sotaques. I decided to put all seven on my site, so they will be preserved. The URLs are:

Parts of speech
Zitten kijken
Portuguese accents
Voltooid
Meonsen (in English)
Meonsen (in Dutch)
Intermediair

Having been passed on from computer to computer and from OS to OS, the files still have modification dates, visible using the Unix command stat, which seem to be plausible creation dates. The birth date do not. I used those modification dates, accurate to the second, as the publication dates in the HTML time tags. Thus the dates will automatically appear in the lower end of my RSS list.