Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

2.1M of the oldest Usenet posts are now online for anyone to read

vice.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 320 posts

Re: 2.1M of the oldest Usenet posts are now online for anyone to read

#91

Post by tzs »

bonoboTP wrote: post #76
_y47r wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thanks! I just did it. Very interesting.

If you are comfortable with text-based interfaces, I'd suggested getting slrn to see what Usenet was like back in the days when most of us only had text terminals.

If you are an Emacs user, Gnus is another way to get the old school experience.

Another text one that was popular is tin, which I've never used but which, like slrn, is still maintained and updated.

Re: 2.1M of the oldest Usenet posts are now online for anyone to read

#92

Post by LargoLasskhyfv »

Polylactic_acid wrote: post #80
ravi-delia wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm Gen Z too and for my whole life the advice has been "Don't put your real info on the internet". The only thing that comes up when you search my name is my gitlab profile and a technical blog. All of my cringy forum posts still exist but they are all under random usernames and would be very difficult to link back to me.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stylometry

Re: 2.1M of the oldest Usenet posts are now online for anyone to read

#93

Post by spydum »

kibwen wrote: post #82
ravi-delia wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My internet coming-of-age was between 2000 and 2008, and I was happy to learn that all the forums I used to frequent are now kaput, with no public archives. It's always a bit of a shame to lose historical documents, but who knows what embarrassing comments I'm now free of forever. (And don't worry, my mortifying preteen Super Mario RPG fanfiction yet survives in personal backups.)

Never fear, most of those phpBB and ubb forums got breached and no doubt a database dump survives somewhere on a torrent ;)

Re: 2.1M of the oldest Usenet posts are now online for anyone to read

#95

Post by tpmx »

hlandau wrote: post #15
__tg__ wrote: post #2

Wasn't this on Deja News that Google bought and integrated into Google groups? How is this archive different?

It really seems to me that archive.org, or some similar organisation, should petition Google to donate their Usenet archive, which they clearly don't care about, to them. Or possibly buy it off them. It's a long shot since it would require Google to actually do something with a dataset they clearly don't care about, but they could get some good corporate PR points almost for free.

I agree. However, the IA team hasn't really excelled in showcasing their awesome collections. The UX isn't great, the performance of the wayback machine is objectively bad, etc.

Re: 2.1M of the oldest Usenet posts are now online for anyone to read

#97

Post by Polylactic_acid »

LargoLasskhyfv wrote: post #92
Polylactic_acid wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm Gen Z too and for my whole life the advice has been "Don't put your real info on the internet". The only thing that comes up when you search my name is my gitlab profile and a technical blog. All of my cringy forum posts still exist but they are all under random usernames and would be very difficult to link back to me.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stylometry

Yes I'm quite aware that if governments were after me they could probably dig up this stuff but thats not my concern. I'm focused on random internet users being able to dig up 10 year old posts which would be insanely difficult given how much crap there is on the internet and how much I have changed since then.

Re: 2.1M of the oldest Usenet posts are now online for anyone to read

#98

Post by Multicomp »

jozefjarosciak wrote: post #72

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.

THANK you for doing this (I said, having never so much as logged in to a usenet thingie)!

I do have one question. Those tapes...how old were they? Were they contemporary to the postings? (bonus question: if so wow, but under what justification?. tapes were expensive right and nobody valued archiving at the time (except maybe this guy)?) this individual you got the tapes from meticulously copy onto new media and all the overhead that entails?

Today I make personal backups of things I want to keep, whether local files or web snippets and burn 'em to a DVD , blu-ray, or optical disk of some kind with the justification of 'can't ransomware WORM media'.

However, I don't do the internet archiving guru stuff of '3 copies, 2 mediums, 1 routine' (or something like that) so in a sense my backups are cruising for a bruising in the case that optical disks could go bad, hard drives could die (these I do migrate to new media when I get around to it, CDs I just read and burn to a fresh one), house could burn down, etc.

Partially looking to see if I can get justification for my backup slovenliness ;)

Re: 2.1M of the oldest Usenet posts are now online for anyone to read

#99

Post by ChuckMcM »

xxpor wrote: post #73
ChuckMcM wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 al…

Is that where uuencode came from?

yes.

Re: 2.1M of the oldest Usenet posts are now online for anyone to read

#100

Post by peterwwillis »

bonoboTP wrote: post #18

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?

One of the things it eventually became was the world's largest, fastest and most reliable media-pirating service, paid for and hosted by your ISP. Eventually the binary groups got dropped by ISPs, but you could pay to use someone else's servers and pull a couple hundred gigabytes of content at fiber speeds. This all while people were struggling for weeks to get a single torrent to finish. Of course, FXP servers and IRC D/C were the OG pirating method, but usenet binaries were accessible to pretty much anybody and in no way illegal ("I'm just downloading the news!"). Though it also seemed like nobody even noticed anything illegal was going on, because most people were stuck on P2P alternatives even though they sucked in comparison. I'm pretty sure Napster succeeded because normal people couldn't comprehend Usenet.
Post reply on HN