Do not want to nag, but where is Naggum?
Common Lisp "Loop" flamewar must be older than 30 years.
2.1M of the oldest Usenet posts are now online for anyone to read
211–220 of 320 posts
Re: 2.1M of the oldest Usenet posts are now online for anyone to read
#212Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks! Some great stuff under there, including the ranting review of the first episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation on TV from 1987: https://usenetarchives.com/view.php?id=alt.flame&g=224&p=0 Amazingly, you could replace most of the content of that post with "Star Trek Discovery" or "Star Trek Picard" and it'd be just like a recent post! I think The Next Generation fared well despite the slow first series. Fasc…
Wil Wheaton reported he really took the existence of alt.wesley.crusher.die.die.die, and the associated trolling, to heart as a 15 year old nerd. He was more mature and could cope far better later on sites such as slashdot where he engaged, but landing a dream job, and being rejected by fellow nerds as well as “william fucking shatner” really did a number on him.
What a shame. It was a pity because he was heavily used in the first series and was kind of annoying, but that wasn't his fault - that was the writers!
I suppose it must be a skill to learn that people dislike your character, not you personally.
Re: 2.1M of the oldest Usenet posts are now online for anyone to read
#213Time to train a neural net to generate some Usenet posts (and tweet them out via a bot)?
Re: 2.1M of the oldest Usenet posts are now online for anyone to read
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
When you factor in that ZIP compresses by about half, that averages to around 2K per post -- one screenful of text on an 80x25 PC display -- which is unsurprising. It's probably distributed in terms of a few long, informative posts and a long tail of "AOL!" type posts, but still.
There’s probably at least one copy of Kibo’s .signature in there.
Now there's a name I haven't read in a long time.
Re: 2.1M of the oldest Usenet posts are now online for anyone to read
#215Hm 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…
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.
Re: 2.1M of the oldest Usenet posts are now online for anyone to read
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not only was it outside of the WWW, it predated the existence of the WWW by a good 15 years.
One of the more interesting things about usenet was it was all text, and when the web took off, some readers (ahem Netscape) tried to push HTML messages into Usenet. Btw... Usenet was incredible for in-company communication. Used to have a private newserver for our employees with names like .customer.help .hr.questions and so on. Was super useful until someone decided to try to put all the things in Outlook.
Ah yes, we had an NNTP server as a dev and support chat/group messaging in my startup in 1999-2002 :) It was great: searchable, grepable, all discussions neatly threaded, groups by subjects...
Re: 2.1M of the oldest Usenet posts are now online for anyone to read
#217Earlier quoted context omitted.
Others have covered what Usenet was. To further give you an idea of how different those times were, here is my email address from the signature on one of my Usenet posts from the '80s: ihnp4!{cithep,wlbr!callan}!tim What that meant was that to get an email to me, your computer should arrange to deliver it to ihnp4. That was the name of a machine at a Bell Labs office at a place named "Indian Hill" in Naperville, IL.…
> what Usenet was Usenet is still around, I still read it most days, with trn. Most newsgroups are either dead or pure spam, but some are active with real content.
I used to use it back in 2009/2010 as an alternative to Bittorrent etc. which was ruthlessly blocked by the University network.
It didn't seem to count towards our download limit either. Not sure why not, but that was awesome.
Re: 2.1M of the oldest Usenet posts are now online for anyone to read
#218Can 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?
Usenet indeed predates the Web and HTTP, and while it mostly existed on the internet, it could also propagate to machines not connected to it, or connected through dialup lines, using uucp (unix-to-unix-copy).
What it was is basically a massive collection of discussion groups, organised hierarchically, hosted on local machines that exchanged these messages with other machines. There was a variety of newsreader programs available that you could use to read and post messages on these discussion groups.
Not every usenet host supports every group. There were a couple of top-level hierarchies, like rec.* for everything recreational, like hobbies and games (I was an avid reader of the rec.games.frp.* newsgroups, which were about roleplaying games); sci.* for everything science, comp.* for everything computer related (some of which was admittedly also recreational). There was also the alt.* hierarchy where literally anything goes. Many hosts only supported a limited selection of the alt.* newsgroups.
You'd post under your own email address, and most newsreaders also supported emailing people directly instead of responding in the group.
I believe there was a big revamp at the end of the 1980s where everything about usenet got changed. I only know the situation from after that reorganisation.
Re: 2.1M of the oldest Usenet posts are now online for anyone to read
#219Hm 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…
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.
Re: 2.1M of the oldest Usenet posts are now online for anyone to read
#220Does anyone know if the old RelayNet (aka RIME) and FidoNet stuff ever made into these kinds of archives? I believe these were gatewayed with Usenet (so you could use NNTP to read and write), though they weren't actually part of Usenet proper. I was an active participant back in the 1990s, but it disappeared when the web took over.
You can connect to FidoNet thru synchro.net (telnet, web, and even gopher via cvs.synchro.net).