the talkorigins archive began in 1994 when brett j. vickers collected several separately posted faqs from the talk.origins newsgroup and made them available from a single anonymous ftp site. in 1995, vickers, then a computer science graduate student at the university of california at irvine, created the talkorigins archive web site. in 2001, vickers transferred the talkorigins archive to wesley r. elsberry, who organized a group of volunteers to handle the maintenance of the archive.