Internet Systems Consortium

From Usenet Big-8 Management Board

The Systems Consortium (ISC) is a non-profit corporation that supports "the infrastructure of the universal connected self-organizing Internet--and the autonomy of its participants--by developing and maintaining core production quality software, protocols, and operations." One of the services that the ISC donates to Usenet is set of ftp archives in which the official (canonical) list of Big-8 groups is maintained along with the control messages that created the groups.

In the control messages are the original charters (if any) of each newsgroup.

The ISC Newsgroup Archives

Archived control messages from news.announce.newgroups
ftp root directory for news.announce.newgroups
ISC CONFIG list of active newsgroups
ISC archive of control messages
Checkgroups--the canonical list.
ftp version of Checkgroups
Archives of charters and RFDs for each hierarchy
Top level directory.
comp.*
humanities.*
misc.*
news.*
rec.*
sci.*
soc.*
talk.*