Who is Henry Spencer?

Henry Spencer is a Canadian computer programmer who is best known for his work with the development of 'regex',which is a widely-used Library for regular expressions, and he co-wrote C News which was early generation Usenet software. He is also well known for co-authoring 'The Ten Commandments' for C Programmers. Whilst working at the University of Toronto he ran the first active Usenet site outside the US, starting in 1981. His records from that period were eventually acquired by Google to provide an archive of Usenet in the 1980s.

The first international Usenet site was run in Ottawa, in 1981; however, it is generally not remembered, as it served merely as a read-only medium. Later in 1981, Henry acquired a Usenet feed from Duke University, and brought "utzoo" online; the earliest public archives of Usenet date from May 1981 as a result.

The small size of Usenet in its youthful days, and Henry's early involvement, made him a well-recognised participant; among other things, this is commemorated in Vernor Vinge's 1992 novel A Fire Upon the Deep. The novel featured a communications medium remarkably similar to Usenet, down to the author including spurious message headers; one of the characters who appeared solely through postings to this was modelled on Henry (and, slightly obliquely, named for him).

In mid-December 2001, Google unveiled its improved Usenet archives, which now go more than a decade deeper into the Net's past than did the millions of posts that the company salvaged from an existing archive called DejaNews.

Those millions of posts reached Google Groups thanks to the efforts of Michael Schmidt, a Google software engineer. But the fact that they existed for Schmidt to find is due to Henry Spencer. "Henry Spencer is the real hero," says Schmidt. "Back in the Stone Age of the Internet, he was already archiving this stuff, and he was the only one doing it."Between 1981 and 1991, while running the zoology department's computer system at the University of Toronto, Spencer copied more than 2 million Usenet messages onto magnetic tapes. The 141 tapes wound up at the University of Western Ontario, where Schmidt tracked them down and, with the help of others, got them transferred onto disks and into Google's archives.

Links

Google thanks Henry Spencer for his archives - google.com.
Interview: Henry Spencer - CLUE.
The Geeks Who Saved Usenet - archive.salon.com.
Henry Spencer Bio at - oreillynet.com.
Henry Spencer Bio at - hq.nasa.gov.
Slashdot.org archive discussions at slashdot.org.
David G. Wiseman's home page.