81–90 of 320 posts
Earlier 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.
“Reddit + bittorrent” would actually be pretty cool...
I and a number of people I know are grateful to Henry Spencer for not saving certain groups from the early days. On groups like soc.singles, we were young, lonely, indiscreet and posted using our real names, because it was a private club then (mid-80s).
Oh boy, thank God people my age don't have to worry about the incredibly embarrassing things we did, or embarrassing fanfiction we wrote, preserved publicly forever. Gen Z, woooooo. Woo. I'm doomed.
Can 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?
ihnp4!{cithep,wlbr!callan}!tim
ihnp4 was very well connected, so it was reasonable for me to expect that you could find a way to get the email to it.
The rest of my email address is saying that ihnp4 should deliver the mail to cithep (Caltech High Energy Physics) or wlbr (a machine at the Westlake Village, CA offices of Bunker Ramo). If it goes to wlbr, wlbr should send it to callan (a machine at Callan Data Systems). I had accounts on cithep and callan, both with user name tim.
You didn't have to start at ihnp4, of course. As long as you could find a way to get it to one of {ihnp4, cithep, wlbr, callan} you could get it to me.
Periodically there was a posting on Usenet giving a list of machines that would publicly relay mail and their interconnections. (I want to say this was monthly and in net.general, but I'm not sure).
Given that and a list of machines that your site connected to, you could find a path from your site to me. Let's say you were in Boston, and you knew your company exchanged mail with decvax (a machine at Digital Equipment Corporation). You could see from the connection list that decvax connected to trwrb (a machine at TRW Redondo Beach, CA, I believe), and trwrb connected to wlbr, so from your machine the email address decvax!trwrb!wlbr!callan!tim would work to reach me.
Folks, I am the guy behind this project. A friend of mine mentioned he saw the site mentioned on hacker news, so I came to check it out. If you have any questions for me, don't hesitate to ask, as time permits (and two little boys), I'll do my best to answer them.
Folks, I am the guy behind this project. A friend of mine mentioned he saw the site mentioned on hacker news, so I came to check it out. If you have any questions for me, don't hesitate to ask, as time permits (and two little boys), I'll do my best to answer them.
For an archive this is a big no-no. Respect the source material!
Otherwise, thank you for the time spent doing this.
Can 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?
I and a number of people I know are grateful to Henry Spencer for not saving certain groups from the early days. On groups like soc.singles, we were young, lonely, indiscreet and posted using our real names, because it was a private club then (mid-80s).
Oh boy, thank God people my age don't have to worry about the incredibly embarrassing things we did, or embarrassing fanfiction we wrote, preserved publicly forever. Gen Z, woooooo. Woo. I'm doomed.
Point being a lot of us I think are really respective of privacy and the fact that people (even teachers and nurses!) have lives that don't revolve around work.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
My 1M message Usenet archive is 5.6GiB of space, and I believe this covers ~30 days of non-alt.binaries messages. The data is a decade old, so I don't recall the exact details of collection anymore.