41–50 of 74 posts
Usenet archives have helped me tremendously. For example, I'm looking for info on an old (non-xenix) Unix for the apple Lisa and it gave me a name (and after a bit of digging, an address) of someone who was trusted with the remaining stock after the company that made it went under
The site wants my birthday, so I guess I will not be visiting it :(
Earlier quoted context omitted.
spam murdered it. It got ridiculous pretty quickly. The overhead to spam was so low as the protocol was designed to be low friction for posting. The system then took care of carrying the payload everywhere in a reasonable time. People fought back with filters and kill lists. But was not really enough. Once the ISPs decided they did not want the added cost of running the servers usenet tanked pretty quick. Still alive…
Binaries killed Usenet, not spam.
And then there were weirdos (sickos?) such as myself who hung on for an absurd amount of time and never once used it for binaries
Other than the nicer UX, is this different than the large archive in groups.google.com ?
Google has had memory loss. I was on usenet in the early 80's and when Google took over, I had fun reviewing my posts. Probably 10 years ago (more or less), I did the search again and the earliest post was sometime in the 90's. Very sad that they lost all those posts (not just of mine, but surely there are many more they lost). EDIT: and in this specific archive, the earliest post of mine is 2003!
It's so disappointing that we could have had Usenet, but instead have centralised/corporate/ad/spyware invested Facebook/Reddit/Xitter/Tiktok.
What we have today is drastically, unquestionably better that what Usenet offered. The very fact that we're conversing in real time in a coherent thread where everyone sees the same messages is a basic task Usenet was not fit to provide.
On the other hand, with a long-running discussion, HN, Reddit, etc. still have no way to see what messages are new since you last looked at a thread, something which Usenet clients have always done and still do now.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What we have today is drastically, unquestionably better that what Usenet offered. The very fact that we're conversing in real time in a coherent thread where everyone sees the same messages is a basic task Usenet was not fit to provide.
In the early days Usenet propagation was slow and haphazard because the communication links available were very limited. Nowadays I can post a message on one Usenet server and it appears on other servers in a few seconds. So coherent real-time conversations are no problem. On the other hand, with a long-running discussion, HN, Reddit, etc. still have no way to see what messages are new since you last looked at a thre…
To be fair, that's probably because it's now a lot more centralized than it was intended to be.
I had tried this site a year or two ago and found it unusable then, but it seems greatly improved now. I found posts as old as 1982, but recent coverage seems to stop around April 2022. Crucially, it supports full-text search on posts within a specific group - something which my own site https://newsgrouper.org cannot do. I find the user interface a little awkward, but it does now appear to be a really useful resourc…
Where are you seeing full-text search for groups? I can filter the post titles on the current page of listings, but this is completely useles...
I had tried this site a year or two ago and found it unusable then, but it seems greatly improved now. I found posts as old as 1982, but recent coverage seems to stop around April 2022. Crucially, it supports full-text search on posts within a specific group - something which my own site https://newsgrouper.org cannot do. I find the user interface a little awkward, but it does now appear to be a really useful resourc…
With 1990's style age "verification" to boot.
weird, it seemed like the search index didn't go back past 2003. And then I tried a few more searches and found some hits. So I guess the index is a little spotty? But try a few search terms, you might find what you're looking for.