21–30 of 320 posts
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).
Wasn't this on Deja News that Google bought and integrated into Google groups? How is this archive different?
It doesn't feel like google has been a good steward of these archives. They blended usenet archives and google groups together in a really annoying way, content has erratically gone missing (see the lwn link that hprotagonist posted), and have seemingly lost interest overall--the whole google groups product has seemed neglected for years. My guess is the only reason it hasn't been sun-setted is that someone high up n…
Looks like alt got cut off; the alt.tv.* hierarchy isn't there (stops at 10 pages).
I'm a bit surprised that a zip archive of only 2.1 million posts was almost 2GB. I wonder what a treemap of group size looks like.
Wow! It's amazing to see all my old flame-wars when I was at Olivetti ATC (their R&D office) on-line again.
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?
Originally, Usenet used UUCP for transport; later on NNTP was defined so Usenet could be shared via TCP/IP. In the early days, only DARPA contractors (which included many university computer science departments) could be on the Internet; second-class citizens could use UUCP and modems.
I'm a bit surprised that a zip archive of only 2.1 million posts was almost 2GB. I wonder what a treemap of group size looks like.
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.
Comp.sys.apple2 is active.
comp.arch (1986-) easily has 10 times as much present day activity.
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 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.
For the how paid: In some regions it was part of the things a "good" ISP had to offer their clients. Also back in the days™ large parts of the internet was run on machines in some university labs.