[HN Gopher] Netnews: The Origin Story [pdf]
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Netnews: The Origin Story [pdf]
Author : tkhattra
Score : 50 points
Date : 2024-11-05 02:09 UTC (20 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.cs.columbia.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.cs.columbia.edu)
| froh wrote:
| the section "conclusion" is a good summary of the article, of
| major usenet design decisions and also of it's shortcomings.
|
| It seems it has ~~degenerated~~ evolved to a niche file sharing
| platform for obscure contents?
|
| I remember the days when comp.os.linux.announce was a good place
| to keep a pulse on what's cooking in terms of fun FOSS software.
| whartung wrote:
| I read the conclusion, not the entire article.
|
| The 300TB a day at the modern news provider is staggering, and
| it's a shame it's 99+% piracy and porn.
|
| "My" USENET was all newsgroups. rec.motorycles, comp.lang.lisp,
| etc.
|
| We had a UUNET feed at the office, one of the large hubs for
| USENET, and a "smart router" (we could feed everything to
| UUNET, and they'd figure out how to move it from there). We had
| bang path email addresses as well. These still linger in old
| USENET archived post signatures.
|
| I paired off a local fellow who paired off of UCLA for my home
| feed, and that was fed by a 2400 baud modem. When you're not
| just sitting there staring at the blinking cursor and the text
| crawl, 2400 is shockingly adequate for background text traffic,
| even though even back then, it was uncompressed. Over 80
| notbook size pages of text in a half hour. You just don't
| "subscribe to everything".
|
| Later I switched to a dial up Netcom shell account, running
| `nn` for news and `elm` for mail. I didn't have "internet" at
| home until 1998 when I finally got cable TV and a cable modem.
| (It was pretty exciting installing BSD from a single floppy
| that downloaded the rest from the internet!)
|
| Ah, the halcyon days when signal was > noise on a public
| infrastructure.
| pwg wrote:
| > It seems it has ~~degenerated~~ evolved to a niche file
| sharing platform for obscure contents?
|
| While it has done so in a "total bytes transferred daily"
| metric manner, there are still active groups.
|
| comp.misc has a reasonable amount of misc. computer related
| posts (and some amount of off-topic that one needs to tune
| their killfile to exclude)
|
| comp.os.linux.misc has a fair amount of traffic at the moment
| (although the volume does vary over time).
|
| You can get free access with an ES account
| (https://www.eternal-september.org/).
| kps wrote:
| There is a probably-'80s document that I would like to find
| again, written I think by some university as an 'introduction to
| Usenet' for students. It had a section I particularly remember
| about focusing discussions on the _topic_ of a newsgroup rather
| than on the _newsgroup_. Anyone recognize this?
|
| (Today is Tuesday the 11389th of September 1993.)
| wduquette wrote:
| "Personally owned computers--microcomputers, in the terminology
| of the day--were rare and were the domain of a few hobbyists.
| Most were very small and generally lacked hard drives; bulk
| storage was via audio cassette tape or (for the lucky few) on
| floppy disks with a capacity of about 1.5 megabytes."
|
| 1.5 megabytes? Um, no. 3.5" floppies weren't out yet in 1979, and
| they were 1.44MB. 5.25" double-sided high-density floppies were
| 1.2MB, and I'm not sure they were were out yet either. I was
| using 8" floppies in 1979, and IIRC they were about 250KB
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