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

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

#271

Post by throw0101a »

bonoboTP wrote: post #38
johannes1234321 wrote: post #29

Earlier 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.…

> What if you're subscribed to alt.binaries? Do you then sync all the binaries when you go online?

Yes. Your news reader (nee aggregator) would use the NNTP protocol to tell the server "please give me a list of articles in groups X, Y, and Z". Your reader would know you read up to article 234 in a group previously, but now there were 266, so there were 32 new ones. You'd tell the reader UI to go into that group, which would cause it to download the new articles (headers) and display them to you. If you saw a particular thread you liked you'd select that and the body of the article(s) would be downloaded.

If you wanted to do offline reading there was a file format call SOUP which would allow you to download it to your local machine (remember, this was often in the age of dial-up). There is no article on SOUP, but a similar idea was QWK for BBSes:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QWK_(file_format)

To distribute articles/posts globally an NNTP server would talk to other NNTP servers: technically peer-to-peer was/is possible, but it was often hierarchical. One could also have site/local-only groups and global groups.

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

#272

Post by s1mon »

jcranmer wrote: post #104
ioseph wrote: post #67

It's really striking the relatively high quality of post content. Jumping into a group related to an interest of mine all the discussions are very engaging. Assuming there's little in the way of moderation perhaps there's something to be said for small networks with a barrier to entry.

When Usenet originated, you needed to have an Internet-connected computer. In the late 80s, this was largely limited to university campuses, which meant that the process of educating new members on the social norms already in place largely only needed to happen for a few weeks in September. In September 1993, AOL offered Usenet access to any AOL subscriber. This gave rise to the term Eternal September.

Eternal September may have come long before that. I was at Carnegie Mellon from 86-90 as a student and until 93 as an employee. It was a very big deal to Usenet when they turned on Usenet access for anyone at CMU with an andrew.cmu.edu account (a few thousand people) I think around 87. There just weren't that many people on Usenet back then, so this was a big percentage increase. Also every year (well before 93) there would be new freshmen at plenty of campuses who would get on Usenet for the first time. So you had a bunch of crunchy old neck beards who lived on Usenet, and then some clueless 17 year old kids who likely hadn't even been on a BBS prior to Usenet. The culture clash and noise was challenging.

You have to remember this was before the web. There were ways to have FTP sites or other more permanent locations to share FAQs if you knew where to look, but for the most part someone new would show up on a newsgroup and start asking the same newbie questions all over again, or hit some hot-button issue for that group and re-start an epic flame war. So each September or so would be an influx of people who didn't understand or know the culture and it was uncomfortable for all the people who had been in the club prior to that year's new kids.

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

#273

Post by throw0101a »

sokoloff wrote: post #75
ioseph wrote: post #67

It's really striking the relatively high quality of post content. Jumping into a group related to an interest of mine all the discussions are very engaging. Assuming there's little in the way of moderation perhaps there's something to be said for small networks with a barrier to entry.

That, plus kill files, plus probably a more university-educated and often affiliated population (.edu employees and student, and white collar business population).

plonk

:)

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

#274

Post by [deleted] »

stragulus wrote: post #193
bigiain wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe rot13 the words you think you need to censor? That'd be in keeping with the usenet tradition at least from the mid-late 90s when I was reading/posting heavily. And maybe add a simple javascript ROT13 widget so people can easily reveal it? (There was a time in my life when I could read ROT13-ed things pretty accurately in my head.)

Double rot13 just to be sure.

[deleted]

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

#275

Post by ddingus »

mjayhn wrote: post #247
Jaruzel wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is something that I've been aware of for a while now. Us (Gen-Xrs) have had a rough time of it; The boomers rode the financial booms and mostly did well, and the millennials are pandered to everywhere you look, whereas we had to suffer more than one financial crash, and the media and retail pretend like we don't exist, so nothing is aligned to our values or desires. Even worse, there's a large chunk of millenial…

This is very far off from my millennial experience 1; I’m a 34yo millennial, 2; my siblings are ~40ish yo gen-xers, 3; my parents are 65yo boomers. My genx siblings all bought massive houses around 2008 when I was starting my career which in 2008 meant being lucky to make $40k as a sysadmin. Obama subsidies all over the place if you had 5-10 years to put together a downpayment, though. I don’t think my paycheck becam…

Mentoring is right up there at the top of things we can all do to improve the world for everyone.

Yeah, it does suck. Has for a long run now. You are not wrong.

I was mentored by boomers who passed the power and importance of it on to me. GenX'er here

That may be rare. I don't know.

What I do know is when we all help the new, up and coming people, it pays off nicely.

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

#277

Post by Stratoscope »

dredmorbius wrote: post #180
usefulcat wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For that example, it's at least fairly obvious why it was censored, but this one really puzzles me: "Getting good FP performance from a micro seems to require pipelining. Keeping the p e(s) full seems to require a certain amount of parallelism and regularity." https://www.usenetarchives.com/view.php?id=comp.arch&g=14965... Edit: Ah, the irony. HN markdown causes two consecutive asterisks to disappear.

You can note markup in a code block --- 4 space indent. A code block. Two asterisks follow: ** This normally would be *italicised*.

It's two spaces. Of course four will work as well, it just adds extra indentation.

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

#278

Post by kazinator »

timonoko wrote: post #211

Do not want to nag, but where is Naggum? Common Lisp "Loop" flamewar must be older than 30 years.

Wikipedia says "Since the early 1990s [Erik Naggum] was also a provocative participant on various Usenet discussion groups". If you can't find him, maybe he's still outside of the window that is currently being offered, evidently ending in 1991.

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

#280

Post by icedchai »

jcranmer wrote: post #104
ioseph wrote: post #67

It's really striking the relatively high quality of post content. Jumping into a group related to an interest of mine all the discussions are very engaging. Assuming there's little in the way of moderation perhaps there's something to be said for small networks with a barrier to entry.

When Usenet originated, you needed to have an Internet-connected computer. In the late 80s, this was largely limited to university campuses, which meant that the process of educating new members on the social norms already in place largely only needed to happen for a few weeks in September. In September 1993, AOL offered Usenet access to any AOL subscriber. This gave rise to the term Eternal September.

You didn't need to be directly connected to the internet. Dialup UUCP feeds were available starting in the late 80's. I had a UUCP feed of about a dozen groups when I was in high school, around 1992 or so. I used AmigaUUCP and dialed up to a local internet provider. I also had 4 or 5 other sites dialing into me and indirectly had a few other upstream UUCP connections. Fun times!
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