I'm looking for the original posting by a person named Chris Handy
announcing the search for Linux users in the Puget Sound area. This
message is
the beginning of TACLUG (Tacoma Linux User Group) and I wanted to get
it for posterity's sake.

Year would have been 1998, author would have been Chris Handy,
e-mail address could be any of: cshandy@frugal.com,
cshandy@powerscourt.com, or just cshandy@ whatever). I'm pretty sure
it was on Usenet but I won't swear to it.

Thanks and good luck :-)

Close but no cigar -- from linux.redhat.digest, here's a message
indicating that the group had formed in December, 1998.  They still
exist and you may have better luck trying to find the announcement
message directly from the Tacoma Linux User Group at:
www.taclug.org

>Date: Wed, 06 Jan 1999 01:34:46 -0600
>From: Robert Canary <rwcanary@mail.lig.bellsouth.net>
>To: redhat-list@redhat.com
>Subject: Re: new linux meeting
>Message-ID: <36931216.51F13CAC@mail.lig.bellsouth.net>
>Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
>Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
>
>melhopper@foxinternet.net wrote:
>
> to all linuxes's there is a new linux users group in tacoma,wa
> called taclug at url http://www.taclug.com/ WOW  Mel :-)

Jan 1999 is indeed very close!

And by the way, I am a member of TacLUG. One of us is writing our
history, and is trying to find that original post.

Thanks for the find, omnivorous-ga. Very close :-)

Let's see if someone else has better luck...

Errance -- maybe he sent the announcement out via Snail Mail ;=)

Google Groups allows one to search Usenet postings (unless one has
nuked one's old posts) clear back to the beginning of the 1980's. 
I've tried government and local university domain names (as well as
the obvious Unix/Linux groups), to no avail.

Here's a historical resource for archived web pages that you may find
useful:
http://web.archive.org/collections/web.html

TACLUG has a page archived in the above from Jan. 1999.

Greetings from Mukilteo,

Omnivorous-GA