[HN Gopher] 80s Usenet first cultural references
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80s Usenet first cultural references
Author : cpp_frog
Score : 87 points
Date : 2022-03-11 17:45 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.eightyeightynine.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.eightyeightynine.com)
| marban wrote:
| Unfortunately, thanks to Discord and all the other walled gardens
| we won't see this quality of historic trivia being archived for
| future generations.
| michaelcampbell wrote:
| I was a big usenet and mailing list fan back then and really
| hated the "newcomer" web forums. And it just got worse.
| taviso wrote:
| Until recently there was an art project called olduse.net that
| replayed usenet posts with a 30 year time delay. It worked over
| nntp so you accessed it with a newsreader.
|
| I really enjoyed reading through old discussions at the speed
| they happened, but sadly they shut down recently :(
|
| They released the source code though, perhaps one weekend I'll
| restart it!
| myself248 wrote:
| Oh from the title I was expecting the inverse -- the first time
| someone in popular media mentioned the internet in some way.
|
| I still remember the first time I heard _modem sounds_ in a radio
| ad spot. I about fell out of my chair. Why would someone
| advertise that? Only like 0.0001% of the listenership would know
| what that sound means! Oh wait.... are there more people who'd
| recognize that now? Hmm, I guess that might be the case. Whoah.
| Some advertiser, whose job is to know these things, believes a
| commercially significant fraction of listeners would know that.
| WHOAH.
|
| What is happening???
|
| The idea that modems and computers were going mainstream, was a
| paradigm shift I think other folks must've experienced but we
| don't seem to talk much about. Anyone under about age 35 I figure
| has always known the internet as a popular thing, and I don't
| know if it's possible to convey how huge a transformation that
| was for us older folks who lived through it. Imagine a talkshow
| guest just casually mentioning their fursona like it's no big
| deal and the host just responds by talking about theirs like of
| course this is something everyone does. That's the level of shock
| and confusion.
|
| But it's bigger than that. This wasn't just a hobby, I mean it
| was a hobby, but it's one that everyone involved understood would
| change the world if it went mainstream. Of course that would
| never happen...
| cpp_frog wrote:
| Interesting, In what year did this happen? I wonder if it's
| related to the Eternal September.
| myself248 wrote:
| Oh now that's a good question. I'm thinking 1994, because of
| which radio station I was listening to and I wasn't sick of
| them yet... Now I wish I had a written note of it.
| branon wrote:
| The last link on the page (Nov 1989 First post from Berlin after
| the wall came down) seems to be wrong, it links to the page
| itself
| gpvos wrote:
| A typo in the HTML syntax. View Source is your friend.
| http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=85%40nixbln.UUCP
| jes wrote:
| I got a lot of pleasure from Usenet / Nutnews back in the day.
|
| I sometimes wonder if I should try to find an NNTP feed and a
| version of rn (1) and check it out again.
| aaron695 wrote:
| magpi3 wrote:
| From the first mention of "Return of the Jedi":
|
| "I wish Lucas & Co. would get the thing going a little faster. I
| can't really imagine waiting until 1997 to see all nine parts of
| the Star Wars series."
| layer8 wrote:
| They would be so horrified by what actually happened.
| krapp wrote:
| I don't know. The mainline franchise turned out to be kind of
| a disaster (the prequels less so than the sequels,
| surprisingly) but the ancillary content has been pretty good.
| mcbuilder wrote:
| I'd be curious if someone trained a large language model (i.e.
| BERT, GPT) on the Usenet data, and compare with those trained on
| modern datasets (i.e. reddit).
| classichasclass wrote:
| The Commodore 64 example is quite interesting. The reply is from
| Brad Templeton from his U Waterloo account.
| ashleyn wrote:
| Here's one I like to share with people since it feels so topical
| today. Mark Pitcavage asking Usenet in 1995 why _Calvin and
| Hobbes_ had almost no black characters. 1995 was while _Calvin_
| was still being published.
|
| https://groups.google.com/g/rec.arts.comics.strips/c/Y6VScu0...
| 1over137 wrote:
| Hilarious how they go to the trouble of obfuscating email
| addresses, but phone numbers and postal addresses are right
| there.
| ChickeNES wrote:
| Found the original URL for this from an old Slashdot post, here
| it is on the Wayback Machine:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20011212191924/http://www.google... I
| remember reading this when it first happened, now it's twenty
| years later, ouch.
| bloqs wrote:
| Cant seem to browse these, rejected requests by google
| 0898 wrote:
| Yes - I also recall reading this in 2002 when Google took over
| the Deja News archive.
|
| It's odd to reflect that it's been longer since I first read
| this nostalgic post... than the time it was actually looking
| back on.
|
| I'm sure I could word that better, but hopefully it makes some
| sense.
| kpgraham wrote:
| I am first mentioned 5/2/89. I was having fun writing MASM
| programs and released about 50 freeware programs around then. I
| used bulletin boards rather than Usenet back then. Usenet access
| usually required a toll call.
|
| https://groups.google.com/g/comp.graphics/c/bu7GRoqEHHI/m/6q...
|
| -Keith
| not2b wrote:
| Most of the cultural references from early Usenet are missing,
| because the social and political groups weren't saved, with few
| exceptions. The early archives came from Henry Spencer and only
| included what he thought was worth saving.
|
| Many of us old timers are grateful for that: we posted some very
| embarrassing stuff, using our real names.
| beamatronic wrote:
| I want to feel the way I felt when I was about 13 years old and
| got my first modem, calling my first BBS with my Commodore 64 in
| the dead of night and seeing those colorful characters slowly
| scroll across the screen...
| kkfx wrote:
| IMVHO the main points of usenet does not count much in archival
| terms, yes archives, especially personal ones, might be useful
| but that's just a nice addition, the real "cultural" main points
| are IMO:
|
| - being property of no one, so no one can act as a general
| censor, we are all peers, between our peers, like we are/should
| be in a real democracy as Citizens, there are rules, there are
| "private" parts (groups) etc but we are ultimately free;
|
| - being decentralized, for similar reason, anyone can run a
| usenet server and many in the past have done that, again a
| guarantee of freedom;
|
| - being "local" in the sense that local client can archive
| messages, is the main UI etc, so we can change server from a
| third party ones to another to ours own one and nothing change in
| most cases, we have our messages, we read others messages etc.
|
| Those are the main technical points that still make usenet a good
| things too bad so many have forgotten.
|
| The humans one are: mixed people, on a group is common found a
| guru of the group main topic and newbies talking each others,
| benefiting each others: the guru understand what happen in the
| non-hi-culture world and newcomers benefit from guru teaching. In
| every fields. These days we have HN for some topics, Reddit for
| some other but _nothing_ like usenet, generic and effective
| /specific at the same times. On usenet we have killfiles, groups,
| scoring, so we do have "filter bubbles" but not by someone else:
| our OWN personal bubbles we can change, know and control as we
| wish and that's a very big difference: usenet give something MORE
| than today's "recommendation engines"/"aggregators" while remain
| fully personal and free and that's the most important humans
| points.
|
| Having essentially lost that just because of eternal September
| and shiny new modern WebUI is really a shame, just like dropping
| gold because there is a bit of mud on it.
| shadowofneptune wrote:
| Did anyone care about the decentralization or the lack of
| censorship at the time? Seems more like a hindsight thing.
| kkfx wrote:
| Can't really tell, but also emails where decentralized and
| designed in a way to be as open as possible to ensure
| interoperability, so is DNS etc. Essentially all "classic"
| networked things are born decentralized, even the most
| classic Xerox Star Office System, probably not to be anti-
| censorship but just to be flexible leaving anyone free to do
| whatever he/she want remaining fully able to interact with
| the rest of the world and for fault tolerance, both things we
| need today...
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(page generated 2022-03-12 23:02 UTC)