https://www.livinginternet.info/u/ui_modern_renamingfaq.htm Internet Contents <- Prev ^ Up Next -> The first web-published book - Jan 7, 2000! +------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+ | | | Internet > Usenet Newsgroups > History > Modern Hierarchies > | | | | [LivingInternet Note: This document is the original, so many links no | | longer work, and have been moved into the text in square brackets] | | | | The Great Renaming | | 1985 - 1988 | | | | -------------------------------------------- | | "Those who mourn for 'USENET like it was' should remember | | the original design estimates of maximum traffic volume: | | 2 articles/day" | | | | -Steven Bellovin | | -------------------------------------------- | | | | + Introduction: | | + Disclaimer | | + In The Beginning | | + A Net.God Gets Irritated | | + The Birth of Alt.* | | + The Death of the Backbone Cabal | | + The Last Days: The Great "comp.women" debacle | | + Thanks | | ----------------------------------------------------------------- | | | | Introduction: | | | | Welcome to The Great Renaming FAQ. The problem with most FAQs is | | they are too long and are often unreadable. One should be able to | | print out a FAQ and read it over dinner. Thus this FAQ intends to | | give a concise, readable history of the 1986 Great Renaming of | | Usenet. The origins of the now mythical Usenet Cabal and the | | great "comp.women" debacle are also touched on. Although much of | | what happen so long ago has been lost in the mists of time, or | | become mythology, this FAQ hopes to be as accurate as possible. | | | | ----------------------------------------------------------------- | | | | Disclaimer(s): | | | | The format of this FAQ takes a inspiration from David DeLaney's | | Net.Legends FAQ, 2nd Ed. Thus the FAQ's are not written, but | | alluded to. This FAQ answers the 5W&H of The Great Renaming and | | the Backbone Cabal. This information in this FAQ comes from a | | collection of posts and email the author has collected. | | | | Much of its content comes from a November 1994 thread in | | comp.society.folklore. Also a large number of holes were pluged | | after I read a great history of the culture of the Net by Henry | | Edward Hardy [ftp://umcc.umich.edu/pub/users/seraphim/doc/ | | nethist8.txt]. This document is not entirely original, with some | | words coming from the sources because they gave a better | | explanation. Send all links, flames, faint praise or just a hello | | to Lee S. Bumgarner. Also, make sure to stop by his weblet [http: | | //media2.jmu.edu/users/leebumgarner/homepage.html] while you are | | here. (Note, there may be a few spelling mistakes that I've not | | caught yet.) | | | | ----------------------------------------------------------------- | | | | The Great Renaming FAQ: | | | | In The Beginning... | | | | According to the Net.Legends FAQ, Usenet's collective memory | | lasts about a fortnight. Thus most people know little or nothing | | about where Usenet came from or how it got where it currently is. | | Given the seemingly never ending stream of new users, and the | | drop out or burn out of older readers, the earlier years of | | Usenet are starting to take on mythological qualities. Yet Usenet | | can only understand where it is going unless it knows where its | | been. This history deals with events immediately before the Great | | Renaming and ends with the death of the Backbone Cabal, and hopes | | to tell what really happen during Usenet's more traumatic | | experiences. | | | | The years between the creation of the Unix User Network in 1979 | | and the Great Renaming of 1986 were ones of great growth for | | Usenet. Over the years, a large enough group of core sites were | | organized and linked together to give most of North America | | access to Usenet. | | | | During these early ye would aars of Usenet, UUCP [http:// | | cs.weber.edu/home/rlove/HTML/uucp.html], a point-to-point | | connection protocol was Usenet's only communication method. NNTP | | [http://www.academ.com/academ/nntp.html], whichllow news traffic | | over ARPAnet [http://web.kaleida.com/u/hopkins/arpanet/ | | arpanet.html], (Internet's forefather) had yet to become widely | | used. The two systems were connected, but not as interdependent | | as Internet and Usenet are today. | | | | Instead of looking to the user as an amorphous blob, Usenet had | | the form of a graph (in the graph-theory sense). "Network maps" | | were produced from time to time which looked like this. (The | | machine names are real, but the connections are drawn at random.) | | | | | | 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=+===+=======+==+=========+ | | | | | | | | | | | | | u110 | | | bmd70 ucf-cs ucf | andiron | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | red | | | | | pyux | | | | | | zeppo | | | | | | | psupdp---psuvax | | | | | | | | | | | | | alice | whuxlb | utah-cs | | houx | | | 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 | | --------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | | | Now the thing is that on such a diagram you can choose to | | emphasize a set of lines forming a path through the hosts -- say | | "utzoo - decvax - seismo - ihnp4". The "backbone" was simply a | | group of hosts whose admins agreed to form such a connected set, | | and to devote whatever resources were necessary to carry all the | | Usenet traffic and to pass it on promptly (rather than, say, | | waiting for overnight when their machine was less busy, as other | | sites often did). Orginially organized by Gene Spafford [http:// | | www.shadow.net/~proub/net.legends/spaf.html] in 1983 , the | | backbone was formalized by Spaf after the Great Renaming. Most | | posts arriving on any given machine had a backbone site in its | | path, because it was simply more likely to arrive earlier via the | | backbone than via any other link. Without the backbone, news | | would be i ncredibly delayed or just expire before it could be | | transmitted. This indeed happen at times when one of the key | | sites -- e.g. "ihnp4", through which almost 100% of the news | | flowed from west cost to east cost --went down. | | | | A lot of people got feed because of the generosity of decvax | | (Bill Shannon and Armando Stenttner) and other sites. A Usenet | | feed depended greatly on who you knew and your phone budget. | | | | The mythological "Usenet Cabal," which is often referred to | | jokingly in passing was originally the "Backbone Cabal." 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 softare. Nearer the Great Renaming, the approval of the | | Cabal was essential to the creation of a new newsgroup because of | | how the system was set up. | | ----------------------------------------------------------------- | | Return to Top of Page | | | | A Net.God Gets Irritated | | | | By 1986, Usenet had outgrown its original set up and it started | | to experience growing pains. .The original scheme of just three | | worldwide hierarchies --- net.* for unmoderated groups, mod.* for | | moderated groups and fa.* for from ARPAnet --- and the fairly | | haphazard way in which new names were developed was becoming | | difficult to ad minister. | | | | The setup was bugging one particular net.god, future UUnet [http: | | //www.alter.net/] founder Rick Adams. Adams, site admin for | | "seismo," at the Center for Seismic Studies [http://www.css.gov/] | | in northern Virginia, was powerful for a number of reasons. Among | | them was its status as the only link between the US and Europe. | | | | Transmitting news was quite expensive in those days, so the | | Europeans refused to pay for the fluff groups like net.religion | | and net.flame. Thus the discussion on the Great Renaming began. | | According to a post by Joe Buck, Adams proposed a "talk" | | hierarchy for the high flame groups. (As the GR 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," After Adams threaten to stop participating in | | Usenet altogether due to resistance to his idea, the Backbone | | Cabal was given the job of the Great Renaming. | | | | 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 Gene Spafford. There was some concern that | | the Backbone Cabal, which was made up of a small group male | | computer experts in their 20's and 30's, would be deciding the | | newsgroups for the entire, div erse 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 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. So under | | the direction of the Cabal the Great Renaming happen. | | | | The current comp, misc, news, rec, sci, soc, talk, (local) was | | created. Yet ironically, nothing really changed for a significant | | portion of sites, and almost all the sites except company ones | | still got a full feed. The connectivity, modem baud rates, stora | | ge 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 GR, 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. | | | | ----------------------------------------------------------------- | | Return to Top of Page | | | | The Birth of Alt.* | | | | At some point, Net.Legend Brian Reid [http:// | | www.research.digital.com/nsl/people/reid/bio.html], 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 Barecue 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 sen t 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.* 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 been created around this time. (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 not be able to | | convince their bosses to support.) | | | | Nearly a year later there was the rec/soc.sex debate This was the | | attempted creation of a sex group that caused alt.* to take off. | | There was a lot of sex-related traffic being carried in | | soc.singles at the time, so when Richard Sexton jokingly | | suggested a 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. | | | | ----------------------------------------------------------------- | | Return to Top of Page | | | | The Death 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 news admins thought. Acording to Reid [http:// | | reid.org/brian/], the Backbone started to decline when he and | | Richard Sexton snuck the site "gryphon.com" 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 | | (NASA JPL)" 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 backbone folks | | 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 the views 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. Holding votes was a way to | | make people shut up if a group was unpopular. | | | | 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.*. | | | | ----------------------------------------------------------------- | | Return to Top of Page | | | | V. The Last Days: The Great "comp.women" debacle | | | | 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 wanted to put it in | | the comp.* groups because this would insure a better propagation. | | Opponents noted that this hierarchy was devoted to far more | | technical things. After *much* discussion someone created a | | "comp.society.woman" 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 later, the backbone 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. The Backbone Cabal was dead, | | and the "Usenet Cabal" myth was born. | | ----------------------------------------------------------------- | | Return to Top of Page | | | | Thanks | | | | Many thanks to the following, for without them this thing would | | not exist: | | | | James "Kibo" Parry [http://www.shadow.net/~proub/net.legends/ | | kibo.html], 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.), | | msb@sq.sq.com (Mark Brader), 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.edu | | | | ----------------------------------------------------------------- | | | | About the Author: | | | | Lee S. Bumgarner, a jr at James Madison University, decided to | | write this FAQ because he felt Usenet had come to a point in its | | history where it needed to look back on where its been, to better | | understand where its going. He also hopes this FAQ's format and | | style will be used as the basis for A Reader's Guide to Usenet | | History and Culture. It would be a guide to Usenet life for and | | by Usenet readers. This Guide would replace this Current | | Net.Legends FAQ. (c) copyright Lee S. Bumgarner. Feel free to | | send it to anyone and everyone you feel would be interested, at | | not cost. Like anyone would want to do anything with this! | | | | ##30## | | | | Return to Top of Page | | ----------------------------------------------------------------- | | | +------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+ <- Prev ^ Up Next -> Help Software People Comments Contact About Living Internet content is (c) Copyright William Stewart __