X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: fd588,5c9a1024d0700e17,start X-Google-Attributes: gidfd588,public X-Google-Thread: f996b,5c9a1024d0700e17,start X-Google-Attributes: gidf996b,public From: Colin Douthwaite Subject: 5th Anniversary alt.ascii-art (1) Date: 1998/08/31 Message-ID: <904588124.185138@mnementh.southern.co.nz> X-Deja-AN: 386506367 Organization: Southern Internet Services User-Agent: tin/pre-1.4-980226 (UNIX) (SunOS/5.4 (sun4m)) Newsgroups: alt.ascii-art,alt.ascii-art.animation = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = /" "|" |_| /\ |\ | |\ | "|" \ / [" |") (" /\ |") \ / _) | | | /""\ | \| | \| _|_ V |_ |"\ _) /""\ |"\ | /"\ [" /\ | "|" /\ (" /' "|" "|" _ /\ |") "|" \_/ | /""\ |_ | o /""\ _) \. _|_ _|_ /""\ |"\ | = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = ( 1 ) = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = _ _ _ _ _ _ _ | | | |___ ___ _ _ ___| |_ | |_| (_)__| |_ ___ _ _ _ _ | |_| (_- Let me start out by explaining what I'm doing: This is the latest revision to the Great Renaming FAQ. It's not done (not spell check yet,even) and that's where I need your help. Besides any spelling mistakes that might befound, give me your advice on how to make this better. If you've read the old Great Renaming FAQ, you can pretty much skip down to near the end where I've added some new stuff. I need some clearification about what *exactly* the rules are about voting. thanks. The Early Years The first time anything like Usenet was ever used was during the price and wage controls of the early 70's. It was a way for the government to make sure all the controls were uniform. However, it would not be until the late 70's that Usenet was actually born. Usenet was created in late 1979as the Unix User Network when Duke University graduate students, Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis, decided to connect computers together in order for the Unix community to communicate. The first two sites were "unc" and "duke," commputers another graduate student Steve Bollovin had installed his news software on. From this point word spread and Usenet began to grow quickly. Usenet in the early 80's was an obscure computer network made up of academics and Unix users. At least one AT&T employee seems to have though it was owned by them, because one source reported a post saying something about a light in the AT&T parking lot. According to Tom Geller in the Net Magazine, the first three newsgroups were net.general, net.v7bugs and net.test. The old system could be the possible origin of Usenet's other name, "netnews." Yet as with any communications device, once it began to grow in popularity, newsgroups without any technical meaning began to show up, and eventually caused problems. The mythological "Usenet Cabal," often referred to jokingly during debates over new newsgroups actually existed in the form of the "Backbone Cabal." Orginially organized by "father of the Backbone" Gene Spafford in 1983 and formalized by him after the Great Renaming, the Cabal was a group of site admins and their close friends who participated in a mailing list created to encourage stable news and mail software. The Cabal's power came from the technology Usenet was using at the time. During these early years of Usenet, UUCP, a point-to-point connection protocol was Usenet's only communication method. NNTP, which would allow news traffic over ARPAnet, (Internet's foremother) had yet to become widely used. The two systems were connected, but not as interdependent as Internet and Usenet are today. Usenet had the form of a graph (in the graph-theory sense). "Network maps" were produced from time to time. ( See Appendix ) Eventually huge Postscript files were made showing how big Usenet had gotten. On such a diagram you can choose to emphasize a set of lines forming a path through the hosts. Usenet's "backbone" was simply a group of hosts whose admins agreed to form such a connected set. They further agreed to to devote whatever resources were necessary to carry all the Usenet traffic and to pass it on promptly. Other, non-backbone sites might wait until night, when their machines were less busy, to pass news along. During these early years, a news feed depended greatly on who you knew. A lot of people got feed because of the generosity of Bill Shannon and Armando Stenttner who ran "decvax" at Digital (DEC). During its hayday, the average post arriving on any given machine would likely have been sent through a Backbone computer, because the backbone enabled it to arrive quicker than any other link. Without the Backbone, Usenet propagation would be incredibly delayed or just expire before it could be transmitted. This actually happened when a key site like the AT&T machine in Naperville, IL, known as "ihnp4", through which almost 100% of news flowed from the West Coast. By 1986, Usenet was experincing some growing pains. The original scheme of just three worldwide hierarchies - net.* for unmoderated groups, mod.* for moderated groups and fa.* for from ARPAnet was becoming difficult to administer. The fairly haphazard way in which new names were developed, at one point one could create a group simply by posting to it, (several were created due to typos) only made things worse. (This haphazard scheme still exists for local newsgroups.) Things came to a head when one particular net.god, future UUnet founder and Bill Gates' pal Rick Adams, decided something must be done. Adams, site admin for"seismo," at the Center for Seismic Studies in northern Virginia, was powerful for a number of reasons. Among them was seismo's status as the only link to Europe from the US. The Great Renaming discussion began in part because transmitting news was quite expensive in those days and the Europeans refused to pay for the fluff groups like net.religion and net.flame. According to a post by Joe Buck, Adams proposed a "talk" hierarchy for the high flame groups. As the Great Renaming discussion progressed, it was generally understood that if a group was put in talk.* instead of soc.* it would not be as widely propagated. According to Buck, "The idea was that he could simply put '!talk' in the configuration file for each connected site that didn't want these groups," According to the soc.culture.jewish FAQ, the group's name is an example of this. Orginally "net.religion.jewish," it was generally believed during the GreatRenaming discussion that renaming it "talk.religion.jewish" would be detrimental to the group's success. This problem was solved by proposing the group be placed in the soc.culture.* hierarchy. Due to Usenet's structural conservatism, Adams had to threaten to pull out ofUsenet altogether before people took notice. Thus, through default, the task of the Great Renaming was given to the Backbone Cabal. The Great Renaming started July 1986 and ended in March 1987, according to Henry Edward Hardy's history. Among the people involved with the initial discussion on the mailing list were Chuq von Rospach and Spaf. There was some concern that the Backbone Cabal, which was made up of a small group male computer experts in their 20's and30's, would be deciding the newsgroups for the entire, diverse Usenet community. The Cabal and their cronies often reiterated a magic phrase: "Usenet works by the golden rule: whoever has the gold, makes the rules." This was their way of saying they weren't going to pay the long-distance transmission charges for groups they didn't like. Much of the debate centered on ways in which the wider Usenet community could somewhat support the backbone financially, so everyone could keep getting the groups they wanted. In the end, no one thought anything like that would work. Various people also proposed schemes for cutting down volume. As the Great Renaming discussion progressed, a current list of proposed new newsgroups was posted to net.news several times along the way. However, protests by a few vocal people forced changes (This is Usenet after all). So under the direction of the Cabal the Great Renaming happen. One of the big debates of the Great Renaming had been whether there should be a "drugs" newsgroup *anywhere,* This putative newsgroups was the example people used of a group that sysadmins would never be able to convince their bosses to support. Usenet at the time was a very low key affair and Sysadmins feared drawing any undue attention to Usenet ingeneral. They feared if their bosses became aware of a drug newsgroup they would pull the plug on their Usenet feed altogether. In any event, under the direction of the direction of the Cabal, the Great Renaming happened and the current comp,misc,news,rec,sci, soc,talk, was created. Yet ironically, nothing really changed for a significant portion of sites, and almostall the sites except company ones still got a full feed. As has been so often the case in Usenet history, its "imminent death" was postponed by advances intechonology. The connectivity, modem baud rates, storage capacity, etc improved so dramatically that very few university and public-access sties dropped the soc.* talk.* and later alt.* groups. For a few years after the Great Renaming, however, these groups were not transmitted to Europe, although that changed after NNTP. So the major effect of the Great Renaming was just to organize the groups better. Since the community in question was Usenet, there was bound to be some disagreement over the proposed general renaming of groups. After the 1986 Usenix conference, Spaf formalized the Backbone Cabal. He began to regulerly post a PostScript map and a description of what was a Backbone site. Spaf, quoted by Hardy, said a being a Backbone site ment "good connectivity, carrying the mainstream groups, and a commitment to stable news and mail software." At some point, Net.Legend Brian Reid, a member of the Cabal, decided he didn't like how things were going. So he, John Gilmore and Gordon Moffett discussed the creation of an "Alternet" over dinner on May 7, 1987 at G.T's Sunset BBQ in Mount View California. An "alternative" distribution system was organized by this group that didn't use the "backbone" links. A new top-level hierarchy name "alt.*" was created for this distribution. In Henry Edward Hardy's history, Reid is quoted as saying: " John's home computer was "hoptoad"; my home computer was "mejac". We set up a link between us, and each of us set up a link to amdahl, and we vowed to pass all alt traffic to each other and to nurse the net along. In those days one sent out numerous newgroup messages in the hopes that one would "take"; by the end of May the groups alt.test, alt.config, alt.drugs, and alt.gourmand were active. At the time I also managed "decwrl", so I quietly added "alt" to the list of groups that it carried. " Reid created the first alt.* group, alt.gourmand , because the Cabal wanted to put his recipe group under rec.food.* Reid, who was moderating mod.recipies, objected to the name rec.food.recipes because there were non-food recipes.Gilmore objected the Cabal's dropping of net.flame and the refusal to create rec.drugs. (Moffett just wanted to help.) Alt.drugs was also created around this time. Yet it was not until the rec/soc.sex debate nearly a year later that alt.* really began to take off. It all started because Richard Sexton is a bad speller. Sexton wanted to show his friend Ralph Freidenberg how to post to Usenet, so as a joke he posted the message "I propose the newsfroup rec.fucking." to talk.bizarre. At the time, he thought he had set the distribution to "local" thus keeping it on the gryphon.com machine. Yet because of a spelling error in the "Distribution:" line the post went out into the greater Usenet. There was a lot of sex-related traffic being carried in soc.singles at the time, and the talk.bizarre readers of the time would not let an idea like that go, so the idea took on a life of its own. According to Peter daSilva, this was all happening during a time when the Backbone Cabal was beginning to experiment with interest polls. "Rec.fucking was one of a series of proposals created to attack the Cabal (along with comp.protocols.tcp-ip.eniac and sci.aquaria, somewhat later)...." da Silva stated in a post. (As a side note, c.p.tcp-ip.eniac is essentially a joke group. The eniac was one of the first computers ever created and thus could not support TCP/IP.) After the groups name went from rec.sex to soc.sex in a futile attempt to pass it, Reid proceeded to create alt.sex and alt.rock-n-roll the afternoon of April 3, 1988. Reid sent the following to the Backbone Cabal when he did it: That meant that the alt network now carried alt.sex and alt.drugs. It was therefore artistically necessary to create alt.rock-n- roll,which I have also done. I have no idea what sort of traffic it will carry. If the bizzarroids take it over I will rmgroup it or moderate it;otherwise I will let it be. -taken from Henry Edward Hardy's Internet History. Breaking of the Backbone Cabal A number of simultaneous events rendered the Backbone Cabal irrelevant. The most important was the increase use of NNTP around this same time. Usenet's use of Internet made it easer to ignore what the Backbone news admins thought. Acording to Reid, the Backbone started to decline when he and Richard Sexton snuck the site "gryphon" into the Backbone news admins thought. Acording to Reid, the Backbone started to decline when he and Richard Sexton snuck the site "gryphon" into the backbone. It was arranged to get "gryphon," a 386 PC in Greg Laskin's living room in Los Angeles, to get news feed from "famous and important" backbone sites and thus put into the official backbone map. Also, the new procedures set up after the Great Renaming led to a challenge by "readers" against the "privileged" positions of the admins. Early in Usenet's life, one could create a group simply by posting to it, and a number of groups were created because of typos. Later a new group would be created after a subject had sufficient traffic on an existing group. Then the Cabal would figure out the name and create it. The Cabal was strongest right before the Great Renaming: backbone sites refused to carry groups they considered stupid. The new procedure went something like this, according to Greg Woodbury. Someone proposed a newsgroup and then the Cabal talked about the potentials of/for the new group. The Cabal defined a name for the group, and asked for theviews of other admins a bout the group and then finally if the group name was good enough they would create the group. The original system eventually became the proposal and "vote" scheme of the Big *. Holding votes was a way to make people shut up if a group was unpopular. Even though there is no one "in control"of Usenet, the voting system is the colsest thing to a government it has. The current voted format was laid down around right before the Great Renaming, but not used until 1987. Once the voting mechanism was in place, the individual opinions of the backbone-site admins no longer mattered much.. Lastly, Usenet's changing make up was involved. Adams was given a loan by USENIX to set up a non-profit Usenet site. Eventually this became UUnet and thus as a commercial entity existing to distribute news, had every reason _to_ carry all of alt.* . During the Cabal's last days, its death was quicken by "comp.women" debacle, as it was later known. In summer, 1988, a newsgroup for woman was proposed. Its creation became the subject of a massive flame war because its supporters wantedto put it in the comp.* groups for better propagation. Opponents noted this hierarchy was devoted to far more technical things. After *much* discussion someone created a " comp.society.women" out of exasperation. This person got a great deal of flamage for doing so, but the group came to life after it was created. About a month or so after the comp.society.women debate, the backbone mailinglist having gone almost entirely silent, Spaf announced he was going to shut it down. It had become silent because very few people were using dialup UUCPnet links anymore. A few months after _that_, it was observed that the list had become /dev/null. According to Jim Jewett, the Cabal's "last act was to sanction Ed Vielmetti's rush creation of comp.sys.next." Regardless, the Backbone Cabal was dead, and the "Usenet Cabal" myth was born. Richard Sexton and Usenet consitutional crisis. Yet in a way things did not change all that much. After the death of the Backbone Cabal, Spaf was installed as the new group creation "Tsar." Spaf's place in Usenet culture can not be over stressed, even though his famus "Burn out letter." was posted in the early 90's. One of the biggest events during Spaf's post-Backbone Cabal days was the 1989 aquarium reorganization controvery, which is the closest to a constiutional crisis Usenet will ever get. Richard Sexton noticed at some point that there was no newsgroup for tropical fish officanos. He posted to rec.pets, but only got 2 responses in 6 months. He thus proposed a group for aquaria. When the vote failed by a 10% margin, Bob Webber created alt.aquaria. Soon, the group was getting about 40 posts a day but because it was in alt.* it did not have great distibution and was not read in Europe. Readers of the group generally believed that it should subject sould be mainstreemed via a rec.group. Yet Sexton decided disagreed. A vote for sci.military had recently been succesful and Sexton reasoned "if killing people was a science then so was keeping tropical fish; besides, sci.aquaria would make it to Europe," Sexton says in the Net.Legends FAQ. Following the newsgroup creation guidelines of the time, a discussion was held for two weeks on the group, and popular opinion was very much against it. Yet the discussion phase was non-binding so Sexton went ahead and called the vote anyway. At this point, the Backbone Cabal came back for one last fight. Sexton got a lot of his ex-Cabal friends to skillfully forge yes votes and the group passed 938 to 727. The forgeries went undetected and Spaf created the group, although many sites did either refused to honor the newsgroup or forwarded its traffic into one of the other *.aquaria groups. It was a this point that newsgroup creation rules were changed and among the changes was the additon of 2/3's majority rule for a successful vote. Thanks Many thanks to the following, for without them this thing would not exist: James "Kibo" Parry , kibo@world.std.com, David Lawrence(tale@uunet.uu.net), ebrandt@cs.hmc.edu bet@std.sbi.com,jgd@alpha1.csd.uwm.edu (John G Dobnick),bengtl@maths.lth.se "Bengt Larsson, jpc@hammer.msfc.nasa.gov (J. Porter Clark),Gregory G. "Wolfe" Woodbury, (ggw@cds.duke.edu), msb@sq.sq.com (Mark Brader) Ed.Falk@Eng.Sun.COM (Ed Falk),jgd@alpha1. csd.uwm.edu (John G Dobnick), tgl@netcom.com (Tom Lane), Karl_Kleinpaste@cs.cmu.edu shore@dinah.tc.cornell.edu (Melinda Shore),glenn@access.digex.net (D. Glenn Arthur Jr.), atkinson@sundance.itd.nrl.navy.mil (Ran Atkinson), twilson@netcom.com (Tom Wilson), jmaynard@admin5.hsc. uth.tmc.edu (Jay Maynard), jamie@cs.sfu.ca (jamie andrews), Henry Edward Hardy seraphim@umcc.umich -------------------------------------------------------------------- Appendix: -------------------------------------------------------------------- UUCP/USENET Logical Map - June 1, 1981 / mods by S. McGeady 11/19/81 (ucbvax) +=+================================+==+ | | | | | | wivax | | | | | | | | | microsoft| uiucdcs | | | | genradbo | | | | | | (Tektronix) | | | | | | | purdue | | |decvax+=+=+====+=+=+ | | | | | | | | | | | pur-phy | | tekmdp | | | | | | | | | | | +@@@@@cca| | | | | | | | | | | | | +=pur-ee=+=+=====+===+ | | | csin | | | | | | | | +==o===+===================+==+========+=======+====teklabs=+ | | | | | | | pdp phs grumpy wolfvax | | | | | | | | | | | cincy unc=+===+======+========+ | | | | bio | | | | | (Misc) | | (Misc) | | | | sii reed | dukgeri duke34 utzoo | | | | | | | | | | | | +====+=+=+==+====++======+==++===duke=+===+=======+==+=========+ | | | | | | | | | | | u11 0 | bmd70 ucf-cs ucf | andiron | | | | | | | | | | | | | red | | | | | pyu x | | | | zeppo | | | | | psupdp---psuvax | | | | | | | | | | | alice | whuxlb | utah-cs | | hou x | allegra | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | +--chico---+ | +===+=mhtsa====research | /=+=======harpo=+==+ | | | | | | | | / | | | | hocsr | | +=+=============+=/ cbosg---+ | | | ucbopt | | | | | esquire | | : | | | cbosgd | | | : | | | | | | ucbcory | | eagle==+=====+=====+======+=====+ | | | : | | | | | | | | | +-uwvax--+ | : | | | mhuxa mhuxh mhuxj mhuxm mhuxv | | | : | | | | | | : | | | +----------------------------o--+ | : | | | | | | ucbcad | | | ihpss mh135a | | : | | | | | | | : \--o--o------ihnss----vax135----cornell | | : | | | | | +=+==ucbvax=======+===+==+=+======+=======+=+========+=========+ (UCB) : | | | | (Silicon valley) ucbarpa cmevax | | menlo70--hao : | | | | ucbonyx | | | sri-unix | ucsfcg1 | | | | Legend: | | sytek====+========+ ------- | | | | - | / \ + + Uucp sdcsvax=+=======+=+======+ intelga zehntel = "Bus" | | | o jumps sdcarl phonlab sdcattb : Berknet @ Arpanet = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = Bye,