[HN Gopher] The Great Renaming 1985 - 1988 (2000)
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The Great Renaming 1985 - 1988 (2000)
Author : susam
Score : 87 points
Date : 2022-11-24 18:04 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.livinginternet.info)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.livinginternet.info)
| mrlonglong wrote:
| It's still around. I still use it daily.
| Aldipower wrote:
| Times when real flame wars existed. Fought by persons and
| characters, not by big media.
|
| "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. "
| dmix wrote:
| Nerds love obsessing about the perfect way to categorize things
| IIAOPSW wrote:
| In the most technical sense possible, they were in fact
| objectifying women.
| [deleted]
| syrrim wrote:
| Interesting article. I sometimes wonder to what degree we moderns
| are simply recreating the (failed) systems of old. We are trying
| to move from twitter to "federated" systems, which are
| structurally quite similar to usenet. What lessons are we going
| to learn about why people broadly moved away from usenet to web
| forums?
| Aldipower wrote:
| I still can remember, that there was a technical hurdle to
| connect to the Usenet. My memory is from mid-nineties. You had
| to find the usenet server of your provider, which wasn't
| broadly pronounce, or even another one. This wasn't feasible
| for most people. Web forums worked in the browser.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| The same was the case with everything else in those days. You
| had to set up winsock, set your POP3 and SMTP, SLIP/PPP etc.
| If you weren't technical you were just not on it or you had
| someone else set it up for you.
|
| We're talking mid-90s and Windows 95 made things a little
| better but it was still a mess because Microsoft thought they
| could make their own internet knockoff MSN a success. So they
| put much more effort into that at first. Thank God they were
| unsuccessful because the online world would have been even
| more commercial than it is now. Even now they're willing to
| risk the tiny market share of edge by spamming people with
| "special offers"
|
| Webmail was still pretty new and not fully functional. Usenet
| was just one of the many things to set up. I don't think this
| was the reason it didn't take off.
| jcynix wrote:
| Usenet still exists and the store and forward transport
| mechanism (nntp) and its flooding concept would be fine to
| transport todays "tweets" or "toots" ...
|
| I managed one of the top 100 nodes in the nineties. Two reasons
| made end users prefer other systems: interactive editing
| (wysiwyg) as in forum software transfering onto web sites and
| pictures.
|
| Usenet readers to offer both features could have been
| developed. And running private leaf nodes (as a number of
| people did) would have been possible. Instead people moved to
| other platforms and reinvented many wheels, not always in a
| better version.
|
| Archiving Usenet articles is and was easy. A forum on the other
| hand is a tiny walled garden and if the people running it quit,
| the content is lost.
|
| For adventurous people: its still possible to get a Usenet
| connection, e.g. for a small fee at http://news.individual.de/
| (intro page in German, but Google or Deepl will translate it
| for you ;-) ... disclaimer: I'm just a customer myself there.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| Spam would be a huge problem on it though if it were that
| widely used. It was just not designed to stand up to that
| kind of abuse. It lacks sender verification etc. Just like
| SMTP is kludge upon kludge and totally broken, and nobody has
| done a real modern rewrite because nobody wants to deal with
| all the legacy.
| codetrotter wrote:
| > its still possible to get a Usenet connection, e.g. for a
| small fee at http://news.individual.de/
|
| Does this include access to alt.binaries.* ?
| jcynix wrote:
| No alt.binaries.* there. The (large) list of the groups
| they carry is available at ftp://ftp.fu-
| berlin.de/doc/news/fu-berlin/active
| dmd wrote:
| I am proud to be mentioned in the net.legends FAQ.
| _0ffh wrote:
| Ah, I see you are a 14 Year Old Neuroimaging Wizard, great
| work! =)
| ggm wrote:
| Mark V Shany was interesting but also.. wierd
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