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

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291–300 of 320 posts

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

#291
post #40

Oh excellent, I can now reread those massive threads on comp.arch about how NOTHING WILL WITHSTAND THE ATTACK OF THE KILLER MICROS! For example: https://www.usenetarchives.com/view.php?id=comp.arch&g=14965...

This is the first time reading those threads for me, being the young'un that I am. That said, the some of the posts in the thread you linked seem prescient. Supercomputers these days are a pile of commodity microprocessors clustered together with high-speed interconnects, just as predicted in that thread.

Yep. I didn't believe those messages when they first came out, but over time they've mostly been proven true.

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

#292
post #179
post #115

Hm this is making me feel old... because I used to frequent certain music newsgroups around 1995-2002, and the earliest one they have is from 2003. https://usenetarchives.com/threads.php?id=rec.music.makers.p... Google does have some from 1998. It is this weird mix of people from 2016 replying to threads from 1998. The organization is very confusing which I'm sure contributes to the low quality. https://groups.google…

If you feel old, I once located some posts of mine from the 80's when names started with net.* and everything was bangpaths like foo!bar!bletch hmm... here's a taste of it: https://slashdot.org/story/00/08/27/1439247/usenet-archive-f... EDIT: Great Renaming: n. The flag day in 1987 on which all of the non-local groups on the Usenet had their names changed from the net.- format to the current multiple-hierarchies sche…

Friend at Yale was a bang-path email relay in 1987. Can't remember the structure, the actual address or how it worked.

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

#293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thanks.

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

#294
post #247

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…

> The people bitching about having to describe how to throw a rock or explain why manholes are round? They’re millennials who got those stupid questions when we were JRs because of a horrible job market that Boomers/Genx allowed to continue as the status quo.

I’m a GenX and I got those stupid interview questions. I don’t think that is related to generation.

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

#295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone else remember alt.sex.cost-benefits-accounting ? I swear it existed (around 1995?) but I've never been able to find any evidence for it.

Was it wisely propogated? It may not have been accepted by many peered servers. If I recall not all groups propagated to all other servers (in theory of not in practice?) so if you were not on an isp's nntp server it may have gone nowhere.

Wisely? Seems so. Widely? Probably not (what does on call this kind of typo? Reverse Freudian slip?)

‘alt’ groups typically were filtered heavily.

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

#296
post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Children on a starship. I won't even comment on the Cosby Family Goes to Outer Space. I can just see the plot development. Ratings sag, knock up the Security Officer. Awww. Cute baby scene. Actually, it was the Security Officer's Wife, Keiko. :D

Keiko was the wife of the transporter chief, no?

Miles O'Brien was promoted to security officer after Worf left, on the Enterprise-D iirc.

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

#297
post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keiko was the wife of the transporter chief, no?

Miles O'Brien was promoted to security officer after Worf left, on the Enterprise-D iirc.

O'Brien transferred from the Enterprise D to Deep Space 9 in 2369, while Worf continued with the Enterprise until it was destroyed in 2371. The next year Worf also transferred to DS9.

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

#298
post #6

Interesting that COMP.LANG.LISP has posts dating last month. I guess the network isn't dead. I wonder if there are groups with interesting recent activity.

I looked at COMP.LANG.SMALLTALK to see if I could figure out why Google is still blocking it but the contents seem to be from Scheme instead:

https://www.usenetarchives.com/threads.php?id=comp.lang.smal...

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

#299
post #298
post #6

Interesting that COMP.LANG.LISP has posts dating last month. I guess the network isn't dead. I wonder if there are groups with interesting recent activity.

I looked at COMP.LANG.SMALLTALK to see if I could figure out why Google is still blocking it but the contents seem to be from Scheme instead: https://www.usenetarchives.com/threads.php?id=comp.lang.smal...

That's interesting. It's around July 2006 that the posts started to change from being about Smalltalk to being about Lisp. Who knows if there's a thread that comments on the change.

I see the posts there are pretty interesting. This one led me to a bit of a rabbit hole:

https://www.usenetarchives.com/view.php?id=comp.lang.smallta...

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

#300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just want to say thank you to you and everyone involved! I ran a little mini project a while ago to archive my old Usenet posts by using puppeteer to scrape the content from Google groups, knowing full well that they could shut it down by fiat any time. I've frankly never trusted them as a steward for this and I'm glad to see someone stepping in. Do you have any plans to team up with the Internet Archive on this?

Once I have everything in DB format, I'll certainly attempt to post it there.

Please get in touch with collections-service@archive.org (Internet Archive Patron Services) when you’re ready. They will assist you with uploading the corpus to the archive (item creation, collection creation and assignment, metadata hygiene, etc). Thank you for your efforts!
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