Glad I can now read all the old posts from alt.fan.dragonball now
2.1M of the oldest Usenet posts are now online for anyone to read
51–60 of 320 posts
Re: 2.1M of the oldest Usenet posts are now online for anyone to read
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
Think something like Reddit + Bittorrent. Slight difference -- there would be no main "front page," -- only individual self-hosted hubs that could choose which "subreddits" (newsgroups) they would carry.
How did you get a username? What was its format? Something structured like an email address or just any string?
I'd say that's where my analogy breaks down a bit. Reddit has a fully centralized username system, in Usenet it would be up to the individual hub (as I recall?) The Mastodon ecosystem today is a better analogy here.
Re: 2.1M of the oldest Usenet posts are now online for anyone to read
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
i was curious if the alt.binary.* was going to be included. lots of really old software split into RAR files binhexed into large swathes of text.
Which makes me wonder if anti-virus software maintains 25+ years worth of data that might be required to detect a virus from a cracked exe posted in the mid-90s.
How much danger is a DOS bootsector virus to a modern system? I guess DOSBox might be vulnerable since it does such a good job of emulating the hardware.
Re: 2.1M of the oldest Usenet posts are now online for anyone to read
#54Can someone explain Usenet to me? As I understand it, it's not a website. Is it something outside of the WWW? Does it have its own protocol or does it use HTTP? Do you need a dedicated client software for it, similar to IRC? How do/did you register to it? Is it paid? Who hosts it?
Yes. It's outside the WWW. Originally, it was outside the Internet. The basic concept is simply copying and forwarding email-like messages, grouped into a hierarchical set of newsgroup feeds. A host would subscribe to other hosts, and would allow other hosts to subscribe to their own feeds. And then just push/pull this through the network. Originally, this was done all with shell scripts dialing up remote hosts by mo…
So basically there was a fully synced copy of the entire newsgroup contents for the groups I'm subscribed to? Like it would fetch all the new messages that arrived in alt.atheism and store it on my disk? But that surely wouldn't work on alt.binaries. Was there something like a cutoff at a certain size and you'd have to explicitly request the full content for some specific messages?
Re: 2.1M of the oldest Usenet posts are now online for anyone to read
#55I'm a bit surprised that a zip archive of only 2.1 million posts was almost 2GB. I wonder what a treemap of group size looks like.
Only 2GB means they aren't including alt.binaries.
Re: 2.1M of the oldest Usenet posts are now online for anyone to read
#56Can someone explain Usenet to me? As I understand it, it's not a website. Is it something outside of the WWW? Does it have its own protocol or does it use HTTP? Do you need a dedicated client software for it, similar to IRC? How do/did you register to it? Is it paid? Who hosts it?
Go to eternal-september.org, sign up, set up Thunderbird or another NNTP client, and you can experience Usenet today in all its glory. Comp.misc is a good group to start with.
Re: 2.1M of the oldest Usenet posts are now online for anyone to read
#57Can someone explain Usenet to me? As I understand it, it's not a website. Is it something outside of the WWW? Does it have its own protocol or does it use HTTP? Do you need a dedicated client software for it, similar to IRC? How do/did you register to it? Is it paid? Who hosts it?
Had its own protocol, "NetNews", and used a peer to peer network called "UUCP" which is short for "unix to Unix copy" (the unix copy command being cp).
One would "post" a message and periodically one or more systems would poll your system. Either over the ARPAnet or via an actual modem. It would fetch all of the posts that had been created on that system and add them to its list of new posts, and it would send you all of the posts you hadn't yet seen.
In a directory on your system would be all of the posts from everyone on Usenet for all of the groups you cared to "follow."
Back in the 80's I could read everything posted in a couple of hours in the morning. :-) That changed quickly.
Re: 2.1M of the oldest Usenet posts are now online for anyone to read
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which makes me wonder if anti-virus software maintains 25+ years worth of data that might be required to detect a virus from a cracked exe posted in the mid-90s.
How much danger is a DOS bootsector virus to a modern system? I guess DOSBox might be vulnerable since it does such a good job of emulating the hardware.
Good point.
Re: 2.1M of the oldest Usenet posts are now online for anyone to read
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
An important part about usegroups is that it is from an era of dial-in connections. One can dial into your ISP, sync News (fetch new messages in groups one is subscribed to and send messages) and then go offline and read/answer the messages without paying per minute and without blocking ports for other dial-in customers. This also worked between different news servers in distinct networks with unreliable connections.…
I see. It seems somewhat like mailing lists to me. I go online, my client sends and receives messages depending on which groups I'm subscribed to, and messages bounce around in a distributed fashion, somewhat like emails bouncing between SMTP servers. I still don't quite get the user experience. What if you're subscribed to alt.binaries? Do you then sync all the binaries when you go online? That wouldn't make sense.…
Yes, it is related to mail, but with open groups. Country to mailing list you have the complete archive. In a way a world readable impact server with append permissions (well, actually there are ways to pull old messages back etc.) and synchronisation between servers. (Not correct comparison, but maybe helps) The individual messages are also structured like mail using MIME.
For what you download in sync depends on your config. alt.binaries is special, I believe relatively young and many providers didn't offer them to begin with ...
When fetching you configured your client "please fetch all of comp.lang.cpp" and it would do. I believe you could also say "just give me the headers" and load only selected messages on next sync (i.e. for fetching only binaries from messages with interesting subjects)
If your ISP didn't have a server, there were multiple open ones in universities or other ISPs (not all locked down for their customers only but either didn't care or saw it as an ad for them), but they could be far away (modern cross ocean cables are younger ...) and busy/slow.
And yes, a server can decide which groups it syncs.
Re: 2.1M of the oldest Usenet posts are now online for anyone to read
#60What a historical treasure!!!
(Sorry for the shallow comment, but it's my hot take on the title)