Slashdot Mirror
Usenet Archive from 1981
Brandon Downey writes: "I found this site the other day, after giving up on Dejanews in disgust. (Does
anyone think they don't suck these days?) Apparently, this site's
owner has resurrected a tape archive of usenet posts from 1981-1982.
The site appears courtesy of Bruce Jones, Henry Spencer, and David Wiseman, who deserve credit for compiling this utterly intriguing
selection of articles from our past."
What's amazing is not so much how far we've come, but how visionary some of the people then were.
Take this little gem, for instance:
Aallegra.131 net.general utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!ihnss!mhtsa!allegra!rdg Thu Nov 12 21:05:29 1981 democracy wouldn't it be great to be able to use this electronic medium to send notes to our government officials? i never seem to write postal letters or telegrams, but we all seem to find these electric notes convenient enough to use often. can you imagine net.reagan with a few authentic replys? The Usenet Oldnews Archive: Compilation Copyright© 1981, 1996 Bruce Jones, Henry Spencer, David Wiseman.The archive gets better than this though -- there are articles about whether you can be prosecuted for profanity on usenet, copies of the TCP/IP digest volume 1, and even people asking for dice rolling programs for d&d on a vax! Check it out for yourself, it's well worth the read."
Canter & Seigal (also sp?) were posting Green Card Lottery Spam, IIRC.
I think they were the inspiration for the CancelMoose too, weren't they?
I always wanted one of those T-Shirts, too!
This is my
This is my
--An Oldie, but a Goodie!
Hope this helps,
Rev
because I cannot find any newsgroups with the word sex in it... :-)
-- Nothing is as subjective as reality --
Granted, this would suck if you really liked the Usenet archives, but I've never used them. What is the need for them? Is it more of a look back, reread past conversations and what-not? Sorry, I just don't understand the need to have it all archived; it's always nice to have the option, I guess, but it's not an option I've needed/used...
I could not justify my existence if I were a turkey farmer. Would I terminate myself? Undoubtably, yes.
The text beneath the URL is a quote ...
Yeah, I _should_ have used the preview button ...
Also available at your local neighborhood freshmeat
Usage: fortune -P [-f] -a [xsz] Q: file [rKe9] -v6[+] file1
Aucbernie.2227
net.rumor
utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!ucbernie!daemon
Fri Apr 16 10:38:54 1982
Bill Joy's plans
Bill Joy has decided to become involved with a new startup company and
will be phasing out of the CSRG over the next few months. He will be
joining Sun Microsystems, Inc., a company whose founders include Andy
Bechtolsheim, the designer of the Sun workstation. SMI is one of a
number of companies which plan to offer microprocessor-based networked
workstations running 4.2BSD software.
Bill plans to continue full time until July 1 when an early version of
the 4.2BSD distribution should be complete and running in house. He
will continue half time through its polishing, tuning, beta testing and
documentation phases. Bill expects to finish writing his PhD thesis by
December.
Bill will continue as a contributor and advisor to CSRG, although it
will be a secondary activity for him. While SMI may need to develop
proprietary software in certain specialized areas, Bill expects fixes
to the shared base of 4.2BSD programs which are made at SMI can be
distributed by Berkeley. The current cooperative efforts between CSRG
and various industrial groups are seen as a model for the
relationship.
Bill has been a valued colleague and friend during his years at
Berkeley and he will be very much missed. I hope you will join me in
wishing him well as he makes this transition.
"What a waste it is to lose one's mind. Or not to have a mind is being very wasteful. How true that is"
Vidi, Vici, Veni
Linux was made in 1991, that's 10 years after this Usenet snapshot. So why would there be a Linux newsgroup? It wouldn't make any sense.
Chris Hagar
"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance." - Thomas Jefferson
Deja's going to be 'out' if they don't straighten things up soon.
Deja is providing a service which is in demand, as is evidenced by the large number of lusers in this forum complaining about it.
Deja provides this service for free, so there is no legal avenue for any of their lusers to require improved service. Nor can their lusers threaten to withhold payment.
Deja is apparently the best provider in this market segment, so there will be no migration of customers to competing services.
Given those facts, please explain to me why they are going to be "out"?
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
What do people have against Deja? I don't see what's so wrong with it...
First, they switch their company from being the top player in providing a good, useful, and focused service (Usenet posting and archival), to become just another one of the myriad 'me-too' portal sites with a low-grade product comparison and rating scheme tacked on.
Secondly, they then took the one part of their service that was unique and served an important purpose for the online community (the Usenet archive) and place it offline for the last 3 1/2 months... and who knows (if?) when it will ever return?
Whatever happened to doing one thing better than anyone else as a viable business model, instead of having everyone trying to to the same things badly?
re:
Aesquire.123
net.unix-wizards,net.v7bugs
utzoo!decvax!duke!chico!esquire!psl
Sun Aug 16 13:54:43 1981
setuid & the super user
I see in the very interesting newgroup unix-wizards there is a reply to a message by Bill Joy from Peter Langston.
I wonder if this is the same Peter S. Langston (www.langston.com) who developed the predecessor of the immortal game: Empire?
This is most likely Morris Sr.... Morris Jr is the worm guy....
http://communication.ucsd.edu/A-News/NET.rumor/
And here's a reply to the Bill Joy rumor:
Fri Apr 16 14:47:31 1982
To my broker
With reference to the previous rumor (Bill Joy):
Sell Berkeley July futures short.
Buy SMI July long.
Lynn F. TenEyck
unc!lynn
aint that the truth.
"What a waste it is to lose one's mind. Or not to have a mind is being very wasteful. How true that is"
Vidi, Vici, Veni
The entry for "emoticon" in The Jargon File says:
It appears that the emoticon was invented by one Scott Fahlman on the CMU {bboard} systems sometime between early 1981 and mid-1982.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Jillian.
Has Dejanews again made available the archive older than a year? Last I heard they'd chopped it off at a year. It had suddenly become much less useful, as there's been a lot of useful info that wasn't repeated over and over.
I was in High School. The CS course there was in a small room (former broom closet?) with 3 terminals in it. One of them was paper and not CRT. Connected to a mainframe elsewhere in the county via phone lines. I can still remember the delay between typing and seeing the echo.
Best Slashdot Co
Most of the larger search engines have Usenet search options. The trouble is, none are as yet as big as Dejanews, which, it has to be said, has done a good job of indexing the vast amount of data on Usenet. In the past, that is :-(
"And the meaning of words; when they cease to function; when will it start worrying you?"
yeah, maybe we can find an archive of people talking about what a piece of crap windows 1.0 was. might be interesting to see if it had the program has performed an illegal operation and will be teminated.
For all you know he might be writing on a machine which doesn't have lowercase characters... like... well... god, I have no idea what you would use to connect from your office/whatever in those days...
A Timex Sinclair 1000 desparately soldered togther to emulate an RS232 port?
Unless there were actually VTs which were case impaired....
Maybe a PET which would require switching video modes to see 40 columns of lower case characters.
Aresearch.189 net.suicide utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!mhtsa!alice!research!rob Tue Dec 8 19:35:02 1981 net.suicide I am interested in talking to other people on the network interested in suicide. I belonged to a club in graduate school, but we couldn't keep membership up. :)
this is taken from the first posting for net.suicide the smiley is mine actually, but it is pretty funny, isn't it?
For instance:
Enjoy.
J.J.
Date: 26-May-81 10:21:40 PDT (Tuesday)
From: Hamilton.ES at PARC-MAXC
Subject: FILM-BUFFS disappears
Several higher authorities believe that the existence of FILM-BUFFS
would be pushing the use of the Arpanet too far beyond its
research-oriented mandate. Not wanting to jeopardize the lists we
have now, I yield to those people's better judgment.
Oh, for the day when such strictures disappear! When WORLDNET lets
each interested party EFT his $10/yr for "postage", and Large Lists
rule the world!
BH
Fools! They laughed at me at the Sorbonne...!
I wonder what discussion will be held on /. in 2020, when an old dejanews-archive of 2000 will be found and opened...
("Oh look... they still tried to discuss the pros and cons of win 2000... how cute!")
I must disagree. FidoNet was a lot worse than Usenet was at that time. Spam, lots of irrelevant nonsense and flaming were quite common on FidoNet, around 1990. UseNet was at that time virtually free of that. Of course it all changed when Usenet became accessible in non-academic, non-government environments (read AOL).
(2:283/309.5 was my first number, several others lost in the mists of time to follow)
"Old Usenet messages - Starting May 4, many messages posted over two years ago will not be accessible on a temporary basis, and after May 8, all messages posted over a year ago will not be accessible on a temporary basis. We will be taking this opportunity to reconfigure the service that provides messages posted prior to May 1999. Therefore, these messages will not be accessible on the site for some time, possibly a few months. Have no fear: We're committed to bringing these messages back online as soon as possible."
Why they feel they have to "reconfigure the service" is beyond me.
Never meant half of the things I said to you. So you know, there's a half that might be true - G. Phillips
I'll probably get flamed for this, but I have to say, ME TOO! I desperately need some kind of newsfeed so that I can get help fixing my root partition (Where did block 0 go?) :)
Mikael Jacobson
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
Man, I'll tell ya what.. When I upped from my 300bd modem to a Hayes 2400, WOW! I was in shock at the speed!
Sheesh, now I bitch about my DSL not being up yet and how I have to settle for these lame 52k connections all the time...
No, but here's an ancestor of rec.arts.movie.erotica: review of 'Goodbye Emmanuelle', the 4th of a series of classic softcore movies starring Sylvia Kristel.
net.movies
---
I've got them sitting right here, but you probably don't want them, it's only a few megabytes of this crap:
Asdcsvax.300
NET.unix.wizards
utzoo!duke!decvax!ucbvax!sdcsvax!jmcg
Wed Jan 16 03:40:05 1980
First post!
Asri-unix.301
net.unix-wizards
utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!menlo70!sri-unix!chico!
trb@
Sat May 26 20:11:18 1980
Usenet r0x0r5! Imagine a beowulf of these newsgroups!
Inflation was prety high then....
-- www.globaltics.net
Political discussion for a new world
From: decvax!watmath!bstempleton at Berkeley
Subject: standard net address
... It seems to me that userid@site.forwarder is much more sensible than userid.site@forwarder. (this is a simple change that had better not take more than 1 minute to implement in any already written code - or else the code was badly done)
at sign is found rarely in userids, and almost never on the arpanet, if at all. Dot is found commonly. It seems to make sense to say, you want to join our net, here is a format for your site name, instead of "here is a format for your userid names"
Aside from all that userid@location is much more readable than userid.location if you ask me...
That *almost* compiles... it chokes on printw() and when trying to pass a non-prototyped K&R-style function to signal() :-)
* And remember, it's spelled N-e-t-s-c-a-p-e, but it's pronounced "Mozilla."
Quotes and references:
The Usenet Oldnews Archive: Compilation Copyright© 1981, 1996 Bruce Jones, Henry Spencer, David Wiseman.
Chris Hagar
"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance." - Thomas Jefferson
i did, but not until circa 85
-a.e.mossberg
How about the first Ponzi scheme?
----------------
Programming, is like sex.
Wasn't there an Ask Slashdot recently about a kid wanting to know how to become a computer historian? This is some of the stuff he should be doing.
-- You see, there would be these conclusions that you could jump to
--
The shareholder is always right.
The Usenet Oldnews Archive: Compilation Copyright© 1981, 1996 Bruce Jones, Henry Spencer, David Wiseman.
I wonder if these people had any idea they would all be posted on Slashdot..
Chris Hagar
"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance." - Thomas Jefferson
Their usenet archive is alive and well.... http://www.deja.com/usenet/
* And remember, it's spelled N-e-t-s-c-a-p-e, but it's pronounced "Mozilla."
*insert shifty eyed paranoid scene here*
They must be stopped... oh yes...You'll never take me alive!
--- I used to moderate, then I read the -1 articles and decided having to filter through them was not worth it.
To me this just once again underscores the need for an Internet archive. Is there any project like this out there? Is it commercial, or non-commercial? Is it international, or national? What parts of the Internet does it archive, who decides, and how does it do them? If the answer is no to the first question, these questions apply to a _possible_ archive. I really think we will kick ourselves in 50 years for having lost all this data.
Where is the pr0m ... ?
I tought this was what newsgroups were all about...
Click here and read the last article.
Here, Bill Joy and Bob Fabry discuss the progress of BSD tcp/ip, and it's quite interesting. From what i understand, bill developed it while everyone else squabbled over clunky, slow tcp/ip implementations. Bill also made sure it was scalable for faster lines (10mbit for example). Other implementations only seem to get 100kbit/sec..
On 11/780's, these numbers typically scale up by 1.4 so that we can project the throughput with the improvements described above to be about 11.2 Megabaud, user-user.
And.. the end-note which proves it's historical significance..
We will be working with Rob Gurwitz at BBN in the coming weeks, combining our version of TCP/IP with his current version. We look forward to making a high-performance version of the protocol available to the VAX/UNIX community at an early date. Regards, Bill Joy and Bob Fabry
This is a killer archive. Someone needs to collect all old archives of old 'net' material and categorize it. For example, Kern & richie (c inventors) have old stuff on their web pages, like Source code to a C compiler from 1971! (1971!!!!!!!)
CLearly there is a demand, and a need for all academia et al to pull old data off their tapes, before it's too late.
net.general
uses for this new medium
Thu Nov 11 22:15:01 1981
wouldn't it be great if we could use this new medium for advertisers to send us needless, unwanted messages about their products? Perhaps we could get advertisements for where to find pornography even! Think of the possibilities!
MyopicProwls
MyopicProwls
My homepage
When is Slashdot going to make its archives accessible?
Perhaps an Idea Futures claim may be in order that says "Deja, Inc. will make its full archives accessible sooner than will Slashdot." It sure would be nice to be able to write a present day article and link back to comments/articles in the Slashdot archives.
Over a year ago there was a post on Slashdot about the origin of Deja News and its plausible connection to the NSA. That post is no longer accessible via the web. Deja, Inc., having started in the "Echelon II" building within walking distance of top NSA spook Bobby Ray Inman's MCC and its linguistic data mining spin-off Cycorp in Austin is a story to which comments in this article might like to link if we are to discuss the value of the 1981 Usenet archive in context of the larger problem it is trying to solve:
How to decentralize control of history.
Seastead this.
Don't I feel young... these posts are from before i was born...- -------------
----------------------------------------
I remember being able to read all of alt.sex, every day... and it was an intelligent, useful, wide-ranging discussion. Graphics? Only ASCII art! :-) There were few stories; most of the content were Q&A and discussion. Elf was top dog!
I remember when the entire collection of newsgroup names would fit on a single sheet of paper. alt.pathetic-egos-creating-useless-groups hadn't happened.
I remember when everyone used their real EMail address in the FROM: line -- because there weren't any scum-sucking address-harvesting bastards who'd spam your mailbox to death.
And I remember my only access was a teletype terminal...
There are still useful Usenet groups, and they're not even heavily spammed. It's worth snagging a copy of Free Agent and accessing the Usenet from a proper application, instead of those godawfulw web-enabled things like Deja.
--
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
What were they thinking in 1981 in alt.binaries.erotic.pictures.hampster.duck-tape?
Help me through college please!
Abigail could naught but eat rats she caughtest in the street. Whereupon she found within a rat a scrap of parchment containing words that hinted at a fortune. Followest she these words and fortune did indeed smile upon her. O careworn traveller, if you needest fortune like poor Abigail, heed these words and post $5.00 care of:
Ponzi and Sons
Makers of Fine Goods
--
Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
Awatmath.1946
net.followup
utcsrgv!utzoo!decvax!watmath!idallen
Tue Mar 9 21:49:08 1982
On telling people not to crack security.
It's like avoiding a black market -- either you "license" people under your own roof to play with your system and (possibly along the way...) find holes, or else you tell them not to play and force them "underground". I'd rather find out from people close at hand, that my system has holes. Telling people not to play won't stop holes from being found. It just means they will be found by less friendly people. -IAN!
82.01.08_watmath.1400_net.jokes
Awatmath.1400
net.jokes
utzoo!decvax!watmath!bstempleton
Fri Jan 8 01:31:59 1982
How many USENET people does it take to change a light bulb?
Well, it all depends. If the person decides to change it quietly,
only one. If he mentions it on the net however...
One to have a bulb that needs changing.
One to start up a group called net.lightbulbs.
Another to suggest it should be called net.bulb so subgroups can exist.
Another to post to net.lb and two more to yell at him/her.
Another to post to net.bulb
Mark to claim net.bulb is official.
Another to start up net.bulb.ge to discuss whether General Electric bulbs are the best type.
Another to say that as news administrator of N machines, he should decide the name of the newsgroup.
Two more to suggest that the whole issue of what kind of light bulbs to use be discussed at USENIX.
Ten more to claim that many who won't be at USENIX still use bulbs and that the net is the right place to discuss it.
One person to make a typo and post to net.bulbs.
Somebody in the midwest to claim that since they use exclusively LEDs that their funders would not tolerate system resources being used to discuss light bulbs, and that they will not take or forward net.bulb.
Three members of the ACLU to claim this is censorship and evil.
Two more to defend it as control of resources. One to ask in net.unix-wizards if anybody has a DH driver that can control
an rs-232 lightbulb controller.
Another to insist that no DH on a 780 has lightbulbs attached.
Somebody from the ARPANET to insist that DCA will not fund discussion of lightbulbs that are not DOD approved.
Matt and Mark again to suggest a usenet policy on bulbs.
As you might have guessed, the correct answer is infinite, cause it will never end...
-Brad Templeton
The Usenet Oldnews Archive: Compilation Copyright© 1981, 1996
Bruce Jones, Henry Spencer, David Wiseman.
This space intentionally left blank.
Most disturbing is the net.suicide newsgroup, however. At first I thought it was there for some introspective views on the possible collapse of the internet they were on. Turns out to be a newsgroup where posters want to commit suicide. (When a poster no longer posts to the group, does that mean he's been successful?)
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
So, are there there any users here at slashdot that did post something to the usenet back then? I imagine it would be funny to find your old posts are read them again :)
Remember the roots of our fight for free speech.
This fills me with a wave of nostalgia. My first PC was an IBM PC-1 (The machine they're talking about here) with BASIC in ROM, 64kbytes of memory on board, no RTC, et cetera. The machine even had a din plug for a tape "drive" next to the keyboard port.
I had an AST upgrade card with 384kbytes of memory and a RTC on it. I also had a Xebec MFM controller and an external Quantum Q540 30mb disk. The PC-1 had the roms updated so that it would actually support fixed disks.
I also had a 132-column tandy printer and an IBM keyboard made of some cast metal heavy enough to knock out a hippopotamus, and the original IBM green screen display (5131, maybe? That doesn't sound right, though.) I ended up selling it for $50 around 1994. The original Text-Only display card had died (I accidentally popped the head off a chip near the edge of the board!) and been replaced with a real live Hercules graphics card.
Ah, memories.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
What does that make me, about 57 in Internet years? 64 if they're weighted by gender? ;)
These opinions are my own. My employer is not aware of them, does not endorse them, and is not responsible for them.
Looks like this site was slashdotted...they moved all the links...:(
Speaking of age, Good God - what is the average age of the typical /. member? With everyone dating themselves by saying "I was only X
years old when these were written" or "I was but a zygote back then," I'm beginning to feel ancient. I like to think that those who post span
all age groups, but perhaps it's more skewed toward Generation Y (or whatever - people younger than my generation) than I thought.
(For the record, I turned 8 in 1981, old enough to remember but larval enough to be totally unaware of computers until a few years later.)
I turned 17 in 1981. I'm totally ancient.
I first joined Usenet in about 1989, just after the Great Renaming. It was still good then. You could read news with rn and a couple of killfile entries. Nowdays, I use Gnus and scores and adaptive scores just to try to find the wheat along with the chaff.
But you know what? I'll still take today's Internet over what we had back then. Yeah, it was a neat little club, but the amount of information (and resources) available on the Internet today is just mindboggling.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers. -- Pablo Picasso
I really enjoyed reading through NET.cooks. It always amazes me that most of my fellow geeks are great cooks (or at least try to be). This was also evidenced by the the discussion following the grilling /. poll.
Any ideas as to why this phenomenon exists?
load "linux",8,1
---
You must not use Deja. I personally don't care at all if they use ads to make money, but the fact is that over the last year or two they have altered thier interface as to be almost unusable. Some examples: * Default search not in Usenet discussions anymore. * Attempt to become "consumer product rating site". * Usenet searches messed up (as seen in other posts) A real alternative would be one that held at least a year of useful posts, with a good search engine. Ads would be fine with me, and I'd even pay a small fee for a subscription (I already pay Newsguy for reliable news feeds - it would be nice if they added a good online search capability, I'd pay a bit extra for that). I used to use Deja a lot to look for all kinds of things, but I haven't usd them for over halfa year and am unlikley to return. They forgot what made them popular in the first place, and are now doomed to the fate of all second rate portal sites - it would be nice if someone came along to take over with the original vision.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Anyone else feeling frustrated because of a strong desire to post a reply to these guys?
I mean, wouldn't you just love to jump into this conversation:
Aucbvax.2628
fa.unix-wizards
utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!unix-wizards
Tue Aug 11 11:41:44 1981
Flaming Psychologists
>From mo@LBL-UNIX Tue Aug 11 11:23:32 1981
Well, you see what kind of stuff gets into DATAMATION.
I don't understand these things: many of the criticisms
are right, but the facts are categorically wrong! Unix
could benefit from some "normalizaion" (the Software Tools
benefitted greatly from having been written all at once, not
over the years), but the claim that Unix does not present
a simple set of principles is the most incomprehensible
statement he could have made! That is ALL Unix does,
and that is precisely why he doesn't like it! If he hates
it so much, why doesn't he go get an account on a TOPS-10 system
or since he is at UCSD, a UCSD PASCAL machine?
Well, enough of that. I yield the floor to Lauren.
-Mike
load "linux",8,1
Their usenet archive is alive and well.... http://www.deja.com/usenet/
Sorry, no. Their Usenet archive (prior to May 1999) has been offline since early May of this year, with no firm date as to its return. Read my previous post in this thread that you just replied to.
Note that in those days, the UNIX community was very much like today's free software community. UNIX was closed source in a strict sense, but there really wasn't much of a commercial market for it, so most users were in the research and academic community, and so had source access, and there was lots of sharing of code and fixes.
The equivalent of today's Linux vs. Windows battle was either UNIX vs. IBM or UNIX vs. VMS.
Around that time, there was also the unfortunate splintering battle within UNIX, AT&T vs. BSD, not to mention the battles within AT&T, between Research, USG, PWB, and Columbus. Sort of like Red Hat, Debian, SuSE, Slackware, Mandrake, et al. Such splits (among allies) have always been a bad thing, and I believe they shall remain so.
ToiletDuk (58% Slashdot Pure)
On Unix at that time, people's terminal /dev entries were generally writable (unless you did a "mesg n" command). You could send a command to a "smart" terminal that would get echoed back to the Unix system. It would appear that the targeted user had typed the command.
About this time, I found a bug in 4.1BSD that allowed you to bounce commands off a user's terminal without even knowing what kind of terminal they had.
By the way, I have a boring post in this archive. I posted as "unc!jqw", which was an account I had hacked into at that time.
Did anyone else catch this post concerning the new digital audio standard that was just agreed upon by Sony and Philips... Funny how no one (well, at least I don't) remember an encoded "card" which is read by a scanner to play music...- --------------
---------------------------------------
:)
sheesh...what prudes.
I'm still working on a clever footer.
From this gem in the net.unix-wizards group:
... What's the straight scoop? What is this magic method? I would appreciate it if you would respond via "mail" instead of broadcasting it.
Wed Mar 3 15:38:05 1982
UNIX security breach
The rootshell: (post contains quote from LA Times)
Computer experts are scurrying to counter what may be the most serious threat to computer security to crop up since the machines were invented.
A group of students at the University of California at Berkely figured out an extremely simple and undetectable way to crack a large number of computer systems and remove, change or destroy the information they contain.
...
[Note: notice the word "crack". At least they got it right back then!]
The script kiddie: (poster asking for the sploit)
Bruahahahaha
EagerEyes.org: Visualization and Visual Communication
Also in that group, an interesting discussion on "Micro" users invading NetNews. You can read the sense of impending doom between the lines.
Sure lots of stuff is research oriented,
so the micro user might not read net.bugs.all or net.unix-wizards, but
he'll want other more general groups on cooking, science fiction etc., and
they are a lot of the net.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
"This week's Computer Chronicles will be about Unix as the coming standard O/S for 16-bit micros"
Do you guys still agree with that one?
.max
-- It's always darker before it goes pitch black.
That's an interesting (and hopeful!) switch back for dejanews.com, as it pointed to the main page ever since their switch to a... well, whatever Deja is supposed to be. Their customer rating/review concept never seemed to be focused or viable, but I digress. Perhaps this return of dejanews.com to point to the Usenet archive is a sign that it will be separated again (somewhat) upon its return?
Secondly, how long is it going to be for their Usenet archive to return, after all? It's been "temporarily" offline since early May(?) - first their excuse was that they were 'changing servers' and now the excuse seems to be that they're reconfiguring/cleaning/optimizing the archive. Whatever that consists of. In any case, it certainly shouldn't be taking nearly four months to accomplish, despite the disclaimer of 'back in a few months'. Does anyone have some insight into just what this 'reconfiguring' would consist of? Deja can't seriously be doing it slowly by hand, though it seems that way...
Amcnc.1058 net.bugs.4bsd utcsrgv!utzoo!decvax!duke!mcnc!swd Wed Feb 10 13:57:15 1982 fp bug?
On our 11/70, this program
double cos();
main() {
printf("%20.20f\n", cos(0.0));
}
prints out
1.00000000000000000000
On our VAX 11/780, it prints
1.00000000000000010000
We are not amused.
Has anyone else encountered this problem and/or fixed it?
We have compared the cos routine on the 11 and the 780 and they are identical.
Of course, you shouldn't have to understand, you're just a 'consumer' of the service. There were a couple of things going on that caused the deja-old archives to be taken offline temporarily (we all hope and think.) First of all, we moved to a new colo facility, and buying the space for all these news servers (many terabytes of indexed news articles) at the new facility would have been prohibitevely expensive. (We ARE a free service that relies on banners mostly.)
So, the 'reconfiguring' you refer to to find a way to fit four archive 'slices' onto one machine at the new facility. Only taking up a quarter of the space will be significant cost savings to us, and is really the only realisitic way to get the old archives back. Please bear with us. I am not on the team that is responsible for this, but I know they are working hard to bring the archives back in a manageable format.
Also, I invite people to actually take a look at our product pages (the "Precision Buying Service") next time you want to buy something online. It really is neat... we have decent coverage in books, music, computers and other good stuff, and thousands of merchants, and approaching millions of price/availibility links. The VAST MAJORITY of these merchants did NOT pay to be on our site -- we simply 'crawled' their site to grab prices. It's a service for you to help you find the lowest price. We don't sell anything. No, the service isn't perfect and never will be, but we invite you to take a look at what we offer before dismissing it out of hand. A lot of people believe in it and worked hard to bring it about.
thank you for your time, a Deja.com development monkey
Does anyone think they don't suck these days?
yeah, me!
they don't suck, they blow (goats).
Alas, the site sank under the weight of the flash crowd from slashdot...
/dev/null
It now contains only:
Sorry, this machine is too small to handle the volume of traffic being generated by httpd requests for the A-News archive.
The site is now offline.
Such is the price of fame.
Comments to: anews@communication.ucsd.edu
Complaints to:
Aihnss.748
net.jokes
utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!mhtsa!eagle!ihnss!karn
Mon Dec 14 12:36:57 1981
How many computer engineers . . .
One to redesign your house wiring.
One to suggest improvements to the design.
One programmer to scoff because light bulbs will be free in the near future.
Mmmm.. Donuts
Aucb.759
fa.editor-p
utcsrgv!utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!C70:editor-people
Tue Mar 23 11:50:48 1982
Moratorium on statements about EMACS
>From Goldberg@RUTGERS Tue Mar 23 10:46:25 1982
It seems that any statement of the form "EMACS does X", where "X" can
be interpreted by someone as undesirable, will be followed up by at
least one message, and usually several, saying how EMACS can be reconfigured
to avoid the problem. Taking note of this trend, I suggest that correspondents
on this mailing list adopt at least one, and maybe both, of the following
suggestions:
1. THOU SHALT NOT make any negative comments about the operation or
user interface of EMACS. Like the Lord, EMACS appears in many
forms. The true form defies description in human terms.
2. HONOR THY SENDER: If someone took the time to analyze and describe
a user interface issue, give this person the benefit of the doubt.
Do not berate this person on the technicality that a completely
extensible language has no inherent fixed properties. Rather,
consider the impact of the comment on the space of properties
that one may want to choose as the "default" for a given system.
Bob
< old_guy_voice >
That takes me back... In 1990 I spent 5 grand on a 386 25Mhz with 4MB of RAM and an 80 MB hard drive. It had a 2400 baud modem. I joined a local bulletin board system and had one hour access a day. It cost me a little less than my DSL does now. If I was quick, I could download about one megabyte in that one hour. Telix was the terminal program of the gods - it had ZModem downloads with the ability to resume broken downloads.
A few years later I spent 300 dollars on the Sound Blaster Pro when it came out - it was the first stereo sound card, but was only 8-bit. In 1994 I installed Linux.
Kids these days - you don't know how lucky you are.
</old_guy_voice>
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
"HTML needs a rant tag" - Alan Cox
"Another free program offline." -- Tron
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
By the way, here's a little gem that I found on ./ some time ago: Jeremy Nixon's Deja Power Search without all of the annoying stuff and it still has the threading option.
Apparently, they couldn't handle all the hits. At least thats what the error message is giving me. Bet it's a Wintel running off of a 56k AOL account ;-}
-----------------------------------------
Perversely greped and groped by PowerPenguin
its very usefull when looking up old information about old computer hardware, an example mite be, if you pick up a used scsi card thats a year old or so, just pop over to dejanews search the archive for info on wether it works with linux or whatever, or , how to make it work theres lots of resons for old usenet archives, manytimes if im looking for something that would be a pain in the ass to find on dogpile, like howto do this or that, without getting 1000 of pages of worthless linux man page listings, I search deja, and many times get a awnser to the same question someone asked long ago
And 550 MB winchester drives for ~$40,000 (!!!).
To-do List: Receive telemarketing call during a tornado warning. Check.
Hey my birthday! (Score:0)
:) Feb 17, 1982
. 02.17_cbosgd.2054_net.games.pacman.html Acbosgd.2054 net.games.pacman
d !mark Wed Feb 17 23:10:52 1982 fixed: the bug where you pass through a monster I
by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 28, @02:47AM EDT (#260)
Hey Here's one posted on the day I was born
http://communication.ucsd.edu/A-News/NET.games/82
utcsrgv!utzoo!decvax!duke!chico!harpo!cbosg!cbosg
found it, folks. The symptom is that if you and a monster are heading for each other head-on, if the alignment is right you will pass right through
each other. (Except that Clyde will get you.) The bug is in the routine pacman in pacman.c. Search for the loop involving dokill. You'll see that
if any monster does not eat you, killflg is set to false, wiping out any previous monsters that did. The fix is to remove the else clause, and to put
killflg = FALSE; before the beginning of the loop. Now we need a fix to the gold count bug. The code looks right here, too. Mark
net.general
utcsrgv!utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!ihnss!cbosg!teklabs!t
Sat Feb 27 14:14:20 1982
Video Vegetables
Video Vegatables
(or I hated the stuff mom used to cook so why bring it up?)
Lets face it folks, there are a lot of useless vegetables out there. You know, the ones that nobody in their right minds ever ate. OK, maybe your parents ate them once or twice a year, but otherwise, they were never even thought about, let alone eaten. I'm not refering to the vegetables that kids generally hate, e.g., brocolli, cauliflower, brussel sprouts, etc., but the really STRANGE ones, such as squash, rutibaga, eggplant, turnips, and others too numerous to mention. Now nobody really ever liked these vegetables then (remember that your father (who would eat ANYTHING) didn't ask for seconds on rutibaga) and nobody really likes them now (when was the last time your favorite local restaurant had turnips as a choice of vegetable?). We have a responsibility to future generations to stamp out these disgusting, noxious, icky, gross vegetables and for this reason, I am advocating the formation of a group called the NASODNIGV, the National Association to Stamp Out Disgusting, Noxious, Icky, Gross Vegetables!
Sure, it will be tough going at first, what with all those high school Home Economics teachers out there with nothing better to do than shove eggplant down some poor kid's unsuspecting throat and there will always be some nutritional looney out there to tell us that these vegetables really are good for us and we should shut up and eat them because there are starving children in (China, India, Bangladesh, Harlem, fill in the name of your favorite underdeveloped country here) who would be OVERJOYED to have a few bites of rutabaga, not to mention the women's magazines who could no longer write trash articles on "101 Uses for that Lonely Turnip in Your Vegetable Crisper", but with hard work and perseverence, we could overcome even these formidable obstacles.
We must realize that federal grants could not be expected (what with the federal budget in the shape its in), so we must find a way to make our own way in the world. However, I believe that I have hit upon a solution not onlt to make a large amount of money, but to also teach the nation's youth anti-turnip values at the same time. I propose that we market a new video game (Ta da da da da da!):
In this game, a figure of a man runs through a giant refrigerator full of junk food, meats, fruits and good vegetables, gobbling them up as he goes. However, at fixed intervals, a group of icky vegtables come up from the vegetable crisper and chase the man. If they catch him, he must eat them and dies with a horrid taste in his mouth, unless he can pick up one of several fungus spores lying around the fridge. If he gets to a fungus spore he can, for a short period of time, mold the icky vegatables and throw them out of the refrigerator into a waiting garbage disposal (where they belong anyway). After a while, though, the spores die and its look out again, Charlie!
I think that this game would be an instant hit (if only for its extreme originality) and would certainly bring in the bucks to fund our fledgling organization.
There is only one more thing to do and that is to decide an agenda as to how to stamp out these horrid vegetables in our lifetime. I propose that we start with lobbying Congress to give money to farmers not to grow these disgusting vegetables (we do for useful vegetables now). If this did not work, we could arrange a march up Pennsylvania Avenue followed by a vegetable burning in front of the White House. Finally, as a last resort, we could all become "vegetable revolutionaries", kidnapping high governmental officials and force-feeding them squash and rutabagas until the government met our demands!
So, I think its about time to stop this vegetative scourge upon our great nation. We must mobilize if we wish to have a eggplant-free world where our children would not have to cope with the fear of rutabagas!
We have nothing to fear but turnips themselves!
Yours, In Disgust for Icky Vegatables,
F. A. Adrian
(ucbvax!teklabs!tekcad!franka)
The Usenet Oldnews Archive: Compilation Copyright© 1981, 1996 Bruce Jones, Henry Spencer, David Wiseman.
t_t_b
OK: it's not anonymous, but, damn!
--
I think not; therefore I ain't®
I'm on PJ's "enemies" list! Are you?
Copyright? (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 28, @12:21AM EDT (#251)
This copyright declaration is absolute nonsense. The content was distributed with the intention of redistribution and the anticipation of archiving. Damned these guys.
Thu Feb 18 03:43:20 1982
To: houxi!ihnss!ucbvax!decvax!ittvax!qumix!msc
Re: demon definition
Following are the definitions for daemon, demon, dragon and phantom, all related terms, taken from the hackers-jargon dictionary compiled and maintained at Stanford and MIT. Enjoy!
Tony Hansen
DAEMON (day'mun, dee'mun) [archaic form of "demon", which has slightly different connotations (q.v.)] n.
A program which is not invoked explicitly, but which lays dormant waiting for some condition(s) to occur. The idea is that the perpetrator of the condition need not be aware that a daemon is lurking (though often a program will commit an action only because it knows that it will implicitly invoke a daemon). For example, writing a file on the lpt spooler's directory will invoke the spooling daemon, which prints the file. The advantage is that programs which want (in this example) files printed need not compete for access to the lpt. They simply enter their implicit requests and let the daemon decide what to do with them. Daemons are usually spawned automatically by the system, and may either live forever or be regenerated at intervals.
Usage: DAEMON and DEMON (q.v.) are often used interchangeably, but seem to have distinct connotations. DAEMON was introduced to computing by CTSS people (who pronounced it dee'mon) and used it to refer to what is now called a DRAGON or PHANTOM (q.v.). The meaning and pronunciation have drifted, and we think this glossary reflects current usage.
<snip>
Ahh.. and I thought it stood for something boring like Device Access and Execution MONitor. I like Randall Howard's thought that it is something that lies halfway between God and Man.
Incidentally, Randall I deduce that you are a fellow Britain.
Thanks for the information everbody.
Mark Callow
And now, from www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon /html/entry/daemon.html
daemon /day'mn/ or /dee'mn/ n.
[from the mythological meaning, later rationalized as the acronym `Disk And Execution MONitor']
A program that is not invoked explicitly, but lies dormant waiting for some condition(s) to occur. The idea is that the perpetrator of the condition need not be aware that a daemon is lurking (though often a program will commit an action only because it knows that it will implicitly invoke a daemon). For example, under ITS writing a file on the LPT spooler's directory would invoke the spooling daemon, which would then print the file. The advantage is that programs wanting (in this example) files printed need neither compete for access to nor understand any idiosyncrasies of the LPT. They simply enter their implicit requests and let the daemon decide what to do with them. Daemons are usually spawned automatically by the system, and may either live forever or be regenerated at intervals.
Daemon and demon are often used interchangeably, but seem to have distinct connotations. The term `daemon' was introduced to computing by CTSS people (who pronounced it /dee'mon/) and used it to refer to what ITS called a dragon; the prototype was
a program called DAEMON that automatically made tape backups of the file system. Although the meaning and the
pronunciation have drifted, we think this glossary reflects current (2000) usage.
Not that I would have expected anything else, I guess..
t_t_b
--
I think not; therefore I ain't®
I'm on PJ's "enemies" list! Are you?
Am I the only one who thinks this notice--
-- is bull? If you're copying single articles then the copyright on the compilation doesn't apply, only the individual author's copyright on it, no? C'mon, one of you anonymous lawyer-cowards help me out here...
Aresearch.189
net.suicide
utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!mhtsa!alice!research!rob
Tue Dec 8 19:35:02 1981
net.suicide
I am interested in talking to other people on the network interested in suicide.
I belonged to a club in graduate school, but we couldn't keep membership up.
-motardo
My guess is you haven't spent a lot of time researching technical problems.. especially on legacy systems.
I've been using DejaNews daily for years (until the bulk of their archives went off-line).
Generally, the tech support questions and answers are better than found from the tech support people at proprietary software companies.
I don't mind a little advertising, I just want a place I can do quick and/or complex searches in order to dig up that nugget of information that can save me 1/2 a day of debugging an old server.
---- Proudly marching to the beat of a different kettle of fish.
net.general,net.unix-wizards
utcsrgv!utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!ihnss!cbosg!teklabs!t
Thu Mar 4 07:01:43 1982
WARNING: There is another system
It's time to go public with my discovery about a serious flaw in security the standard UUCP software in V7, 2BSD, and 4BSD.
I have successfully constructed a shell command file which will execute ANY desired command(s) on ANY system running vanilla UUCP. What's more, the command is executed as (not root, darn) the "uucp" login, thus allowing access to the L.sys and USERFILEs, which in turn yields more system names to "attack". The actual commands executed are also untraceable, but if you look through the LOGFILE, you can at least tell that somebody is doing something (but not what they do).
I do not know if this is the same bug found by Berkeley People (anyone out there that knows what they did please confer with me), but I will be glad to share my knowledge with any properly identified system administrator.
I will send computer mail only to "root" of any system that requests the information. My uucp address is:
or
(many other systems also know about us... check your local maps)
Randal L. Schwartz
Tektronix Microcomputer Development Products
Beaverton, Oregon
Hello, Randal! How good of you to be here!
God! This stuff is too much!
Sombody: put together a best-of!
t_t_b
--
I think not; therefore I ain't®
I'm on PJ's "enemies" list! Are you?
I don't think Ken would appreciate your making up this BS in his name.
KidSock
Reading through the sf-lovers digest, I was struck by the poll on what the price of an average paperback book prices would be in 2001. Now that we're only one year away, this is one prediction that I'm glad didn't come true:
For comparison, a quick glance at my bookshelf doesn't turn any paperbacks with prices more than about $7 US, and books these days are a lot thicker (more pages) than was common in 1981.
the archive is was recorded at about the time i was born, early may '81. this is about as nostalgic as i have ever felt. thankyou, slashdot, for reporting this.
NET.micro:
Amicrosof.170
net.micro
utcsrgv!utzoo!decvax!microsof!gordon
Tue Feb 2 09:53:34 1982
XENIX - real UNIX
In response to the characterization of XENIX as a UNIX look-alike,
I would like to point out that Microsoft XENIX is the real thing:
A superset of Bell V7 UNIX.
We have our 3.0 distribution, and XENIX 3.0 will soon be available.
Bell forces us to call it something besides UNIX (the word 'UNIX' can
be used only in the context of 'the UNIX operating system'), so
XENIX it is.
gordon letwin
decvax!microso
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
check out the posts under NET.Jobs. It seems that Intel was advertising for a summer intern who knew Unix. Wonder if anyone applied??? :)
void theoremProver(){
print "this product is correct"
}
Your isp's local news server. The way usenet was meant to be read.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Ah, nostalgia....
Where the value of X-Mailer: is the true measure of a man...
UUCP... notice how a lot of them have !bangpaths.
Early versions of VMS like to use all caps for the system and commands. I remember looking around an old MicroVAX II and seeing how programs end in .EXE like dos.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
from FA.unix-wozards.....
Running UNIX under VMS
>From SomeoneOnUUCP@Berkeley Tue Sep 1 14:07:06 1981
We (Bell Labs Ocean Systems) are going to be running a UNIX-like system under VMS. We are very interested on your experience with Interactive Systems' IS/1 or Eunice or other UNIX clone system. I need all the info I can get together; we're looking into buying IS/1 and it costs Bucks (not to mention the fact that we will be stuck with what we buy), so please send me your opinions.
Andy Tannenbaum
Bell Labs Whippany, NJ
(ucbvax!)chico!trb or TRB@MIT-MC
-------------
I guess it didn't pan out that well, so he had to take matters into his own hands......
-------------
From NET.micro
XENIX - real UNIX
In response to the characterization of XENIX as a UNIX look-alike, I would like to point out that Microsoft XENIX is the real thing:
A superset of Bell V7 UNIX. We have our 3.0 distribution, and XENIX 3.0 will soon be available. Bell forces us to call it something besides UNIX (the word 'UNIX' can be used only in the context of 'the UNIX operating system'), so XENIX it is.
gordon letwin
decvax!microso
--------------
For those too young to realise the signifiagace of this Gordon is the MS guy who wrote the core of OS/2 and told us how useless Unix was... then he helped with Windows NT to again tell us how useless Unix was... It's funny to get ahold of this and see his "true" feelings before Bill changed his mind..........
oh, i remember back in the day, when i didn't need a cane and viagra.... .'s. you had to wait 15 minutes to download 20 bytes...
back in the early 1980's... when people were on usenet...
pornography was all ascii... the nipples were all
and thats how we liked it!
well, reading this has got me nostalgic so...
*FLAME ON!*
This Usenet Oldnews Archive article may be copied and distributed freely, provided:
1. There is no money collected for the text(s) of the articles.
2. The following notice remains appended to each copy:
The Usenet Oldnews Archive: Compilation Copyright© 1981, 1996
Bruce Jones, Henry Spencer, David Wiseman.
Please note point number 2, somehow I doubt anyone has made a downloadable archive without the copyright... Personally, I hope anyone who does make the archive downloadable is considerate enough to leave the copyright info on the bottom, after all, he didn't have to do this you know...
-GreenHell
"I won't mod you down - I feel the need to call you a twit explicitly, rather than by implication."
Another classic post! (Score:0)
a x 35!cornell!hal
:)
by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 27, @08:48PM EDT (#237)
Acornell.2621
net.music
utcsrgv!utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!ihnss!mhtsa!harpo!v
Thu Mar 11 12:49:31 1982
Re: Disco neighbors
I also had the problem of a disco neighbor next door. He was convinced that it was his right to play "Saturday Night Fever" repeatedly at all hours of the day and night; it was like living inside a bass drum. Fortunately, I found a way
to retaliate, which others might find helpful if all else fails. Try playing Stravinsky's Rite of Spring very loudly (the Chicago Symphony recording is particularly good for this). The irregular rythms drive disco types crazy.
Hal Perkins
(decvax!cornell!hal or vax135!cornell!hal)
I am sure we can all relate to the Saturday Night Fever playing Disco Neighbor problem. Can't we?
Some nice code in there... (Score:0)
:)
by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 27, @06:25PM EDT (#202)
Take a look at the code snippets found in some of these messages, they aren't doing any extensive prevention of bufferoverflows
A Replacement for DejaNews?? (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 27, @06:10PM EDT (#196)
How could anybody argue that this was a replacement for DejaNews? Maybe if you're a pure Unix head it would be (you should be in heaven, in 1981 a Linux box would be top-end current technology!).
The rest of us don't view our computers as time machines to the past, however.
Hey, where's the threads? (Score:0)
:{) I guess the old UUCP bangpaths was about all you needed to know about, in the A-News days. Perhaps the volume was such that one could even remeber who posted the original. I know I liked having trn after learing the hard way with rn, tho. (Late 80s) I miss the bangpaths too. It was like an introduction to routing before the average (UUCP-fed) computer had an ethernet interface. One was only connected as long as the batches were coming across. Ah the days when each batch had value, each article had cost, and local guy who had UUNET and the money to buy 2 or 3 telebit trailblazers to give the neighbors a free fast feed was a hero. Bill
by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 27, @04:50PM EDT (#179)
Dont these guys know anything about news archiving? Sheesh...
This is an Amazing post (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 27, @01:16PM EDT (#111)
Aucbarpa.1011
net.general
utcsrgv!utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!ARPAVAX:arnold
Tue Mar 30 20:12:57 1982
Gates Company
Yes, I too have come in contact with Gates company Microsoft. I met Bill during a meeting and my first impression was this guy is a complete @$$hole. He has a nasally condescending voice and the physique of a 90 year old man. I don't think his company will be around for long, especially after seeing how superior the Amiga is.
Ken
arnold@BERKELEY
I remember reading the Green Card C&S post multiposted all over the place... I thought "Boy somebody just made a huge mistake, they'll regret doing that..."
Aieee!
"Consider yourself a member of a virtual corporation with Mr. Torvalds as your Chief Executive Officer." - Linux Advocac
I had one of those (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 27, @02:51PM EDT (#158)
It was great for home users. No program on an ATARI or TRASH80 was going to beat it. But it wasn't the fastest chess computer. Don't forget about NuChess and Belle. -Ron Rangel
Why no basketball (Score:-1, Flamebait)
by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 27, @01:19PM EDT (#112)
Basketball (better known as Niggerball) was not played by any people on the internet at that time. It was nowhere near as popular as it is today.
err... (Score:0)
1 24.jpg
by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 27, @02:38PM EDT (#153)
Have you lost it, Rev?
Or was it a flashback?
Re:Such memorable moments... (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 27, @08:05PM EDT (#231)
Well, of course you should be paranoid!
Check this cartoon:
http://metalab.unc.edu/Dave/Dr-Fun/df9601/df960
Re:Such memorable moments... (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 27, @12:39PM EDT (#82)
Seriously, imagine potential employers scanning these archives for posts by their employees or job applicants.
"Oh dear. You'd have fit our design team perfectly but you're USENET history indicates that you asked for a bestiality HOWTO in 1989..."
Re:Such memorable moments... (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 27, @06:23PM EDT (#200)
Indeed.
I for one am actually very glad that Deja.com has killed the archive. I hope they wiped the data, and didn't just archive it offline somewhere.
I made posts to comp.os.linux.advocacy back in 1997 and 1998 that I would be ashamed to claim as my own (posted from the primary email address I still use, and with my real 'First M. Last' name. Also made at least several posts to the alt.magick.tantra board that I know view myself as a damn fool for making. In our youth we make many mistakes. I grew out of Linux and the Occult, and don't want to be permanently tagged by H.R. types with that label.
Re:Any bets.... (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 27, @01:15PM EDT (#110)
How about the first Ponzi scheme?
Only a few years later in 1988, MAKE.MONEY.FAST appeared, courtesy of a student at a bible college.
"Hi, I'm Dave Rhodes..."
Canter & Siegal did the Green Card Lottery in 1993-94, about the time the war broke out in alt.religion.scientology.
There's a net.legends FAQ that spells it all out.
Kong
Re:Any bets.... (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 27, @03:26PM EDT (#172)
Canter & Siegal did the Green Card Lottery in 1993-94, about the time the war broke out in alt.religion.scientology.
By mentioning that event, you are infringing on Church Of Scientology(TM) secrets. Expect a kobigram.
Re:First reviled Spam (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 27, @06:16PM EDT (#199)
Yes. The consensus model for an open 'net is largely dead.
The very idea that standards should be gentlemen's "Requests For Comment" is ridiculous in a competetive non-academic world. That whole approach, reflected in TCP/IP and HTML is really what keeps the 'net from being really useful in the modern age.
IB M invents new math
.1 divided by ten is .001, instead of .01. This apparently
happens sporadically, and is the result of a fault in the
output routine, not the calculation. Stay tuned for more
developments as they happen.
After revolutionizing the data processing industry with the 360, IBM is now revolutionizing mathematics. It seems that sometimes the IBM personal computer will tell you that
Yes, I did, beginning in the summer of '81.
The only group I remember posting to was sf-lovers, but I also remember that there was an ongoing debate about who really owned a symbolic math package called Macsyma. It was a huge flamefest. Macsyma had been developed with federal tax dollars, and yet MIT had sole commercial rights, IIRC (it has been a long time, and I've forgotten the details). I worked at SAI at the time (which later became SAIC, which spawned NSI, the domain name registrar of ill repute). MIT was essentially our "ISP" at the time, and we didn't want to bite the hand that fed us, but we thought we should all have free access to Macsyma (which was a *lot* less powerful than Mathematica is today).
It's funny how that debate is echoed in today's arguments about open source vs. proprietary. Ah, memories....
"Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded."
But the most important reply I got was a few days later, from none other than research!dmr himself (Dennis Ritchie, for you young'uns), explaining not only in detail how the word "glob" was derived, but also telling me that /etc/glob was the very
first program written in C for the fledgling Unix! The shell at the time
was in assembly, but they wanted to have wildcard filenames,
so one of the guys (can't recall which one now) said "let's do the
expansion in C", and thus the assembly-code shell called the C-based /etc/glob to expand. Yes, the first distribution C program
was /etc/glob. Amazing.
That email was precious to me over the next dozen years. Unfortunately, my only copy is on an old 9-track tape somewhere, and hasn't seen the light of day. But if I ever meet DMR in person, I'll be sure to bring it up. {grin}
(DMR has a signed first-printing of the Camel book on his desk, unless he moved it out of the way by now.)
I found some cool stuff in the NET.unix-wizards. For example:
Aucbarpa.120
/bin/sh, e.g. /bin/sh
NET.unix-wizards
utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!arpavax:wnj
Thu Aug 13 14:19:20 1981
Re: Setuid shell files
The current 4.1bsd system for VAXes includes a mechanism initially
implemented at Bell Labs (after version 7) which allows a file to
be executable and start with a line:
#! interpreter
where interpreter might be
#!
The file is then a ``true executable'', i.e. an exec() succeeds on
it in the obvious way, and the system interprets setuid and setgid
bits on the file.
Bill Joy
Of course, I wish I could time-travel-reply to Bill and say,
me!y2k!decvax!arpa!bezerkely:bjoy
Re: Setuid shell files
Are you nuts! Think of the script kiddies!
---
In a hundred-mile march,
Star Trek had a newsgroup. They were just forced to share it with all those movie people.
--
--
Play Match-It.
No DNS = No TLDs. The world was host files in those days (to the extent it was TCP/IP at all!)
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Gotta love the quote, though: "TCP and IP, the DoD Standard Networking Protocols for the Eighties." How modern yet quaint!
sulli
sulli
RTFJ.
What is this referring to? Laserdisc?(I was only 4 years old at the time)
Aunc.1823
net.misc
utcsrgv!utzoo!decvax!duke!unc!smb
Wed Feb 10 08:53:19 1982
Home VCRs
My suggestion is to hold off. Sony and the other manufacturers have agreed on a *new* standard, neither Beta nor VHS; it's scheduled for, I believe, 1984 or 1985.
Interesting...
"... the advance of civilization is nothing but an exercise in the limiting of privacy" - Janov Pelorat
Canter and Siegel were lawyers advertising their services to people who wanted green cards (U.S. papers permitting foreign nationals to work in the country).
r eport.html
ftp://d.armory.com/pub/user/leavitt/html/cands.
This kind of stuff is very interesting to me. One day when we are sitting back looking around at the virtual world we created or in my case maintained and hacked on we will care about the founding days. I am glad someone had the vision to save this even though 99.9% of it like any other medium will be seen as crap.
As someone who was not a Computer Science major but took their hobbyist skill and starting making money at it (history teachers are not paid well and dumped on every day as in you have to be truly dedicated or truly a masochist), I find the idea of taking all the Usenet posts and discussions from other sources and making a true social study of people who work on the backbone of the IT industry. I think this would be far more enlightening that most "geek" culture articles currently being peddled around.
I always though Neal Stephenson was more a Sci-Fi writer hack like Gibson till I read his
In the beginning was the Command Line
That was done very well and progressed my appreciation of Stephenson as a writer and some one knowledgable about the history of computers.
It was more about explaining the progression of the UI but studies like this focusing on the people who created the interfaces we know take for granted could be very interesting, a scholarily version of the PBS Revenge of the Nerds show. What do you guys think?
ACK
The number of people in this forum bitching about Deja simply astounds me. It is a free service. You pay not one red cent for it. And yet, when they have to take stuff offline for awhile because it would cost to much otherwise, "it's gone to hell" and people start asking for "a good alternative". When they try to add some way to generate income to their service, so they can keep it online and continue to give it away for free, people give up in disgust. I'm willing to bet dollars to donuts that if that "good alternative" was also a paid service, they'd get precisely zero new subscribers from this forum.
</RANT>
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Awatmath.1335
net.jokes,net.news
utzoo!decvax!watmath!bstempleton
Fri Dec 18 22:02:24 1981 The censorship debate
OK : here goes.
*Flame on*
The debate on this topic is astounding. I was a little surprised to see my own site contributing so much of the net.jokes.q material, but I see other sites have made up for their slack. I have a (perhaps mistaken) impression that the people reading this come from a group far more educated than the general public. We are not the general public - we're UNIX programmers, users and students working in high-tech environments. For this reason I am under the impression that ideas like censorship would not be brought up. Censorship, as I see it, is based on a few tenets. One, somebody decides that certain material might tend to deprave or corrupt. That some people might take something under the heading of jokes seriously indicates they are the ones who should get their heads examined. Secondly, censors (in a broader sense) snip because of possible libel. Again, a joke is rarely considered in such terms. Some censors want to snip because material 'offends' them. It's difficult to argue with such people, (not because they have a point, it's just difficult to argue with them) although many have tried. A typical example occured recently at Universities all over Canada
Recently feminists of all sorts tried to close down Engineering society newspapers on campuses. At this university, the society arranged it so they would distribute their paper, Enginews, only to students who came into the society office and showed a valid student card! Despite this, some people claimed they found the material offensive, even though they had to work subversively to get it. (I might add, the paper still publishes)
The netnews is in some forms a 'press', but it is a unique new type. With this system, I can have the computer screen out the smut I don't want to see for me. This gives the censors even less of a leg to stand on because it is now clearer that only those who have asked to read net.jokes.q are reading it.
Ah well, enough tirade. I just hope that this new form of news and discussion distribution does not fall prey to vultures. Those of us on the ARPAnet and usenet are pioneers, in a way, of what may become the main method of news distribution. Let's do it right.
Another note: Somebody suggested signing names. CCA-UNIX has a rather nice and simple mod to their mail which puts the name from /etc/passwd
(entered vi chfn) into a mail message every time. Perhaps something
for this in news might be nice.
Photos of bits of the past hiding in the present: afiler.com
> Of course, that doesn't fix everything, but it sure makes things nicer...
This link takes you directly to their "Power Search" page (which is all I ever use) sans banners/polls/crap.
Bush should have died, not Reagan -- Morrissey
Morrissey rides a cockhorse -- The Warlock Pinchers
What?? Only that first sentence is actually posted on the archives.
Bill Joy has decided to become involved with a new startup company and will be phasing out of the CSRG over the next few months. He will be joining Sun Microsystems, Inc., a company whose founders include Andy Bechtolsheim, the designer of the Sun workstation. SMI is one of a number of companies which plan to offer microprocessor-based networked workstations running 4.2BSD software.
8 2.04.16_ucbernie.2227_net.rumor.html
http://communication.ucsd.edu/A-News/NET.rumor/
Well, you could always argue that the demise of UUNET started with the cross posts from fidonet....
This is fun, the beginning of the net, I was 5 years old, and what did they talk about those days beside the internet-tech stuff?
-UMatic vs VHS vs Beta.
(NET.video)
-Whether the upcoming Bladerunner movie was based on the novel 'DADOES' by P.Dick or 'Bladerunner' by Alan E. Nourse.
(NET.sf)
-a posting announced the SOS campaign, SOS = Save Officer Spock, by a local radio station called WVXU-FM.
(FA.sf)
-The rumor was that the Dune movie was going to be a TV show
(NET.sf)
-mini-flamewar (4 messages) about helmets and motorbikes
(NET.motorcycles)
-The $6K PDP11/34 4Megs mem upgrade (oops) 'enhancement'
(FA.arpa-bboard)
-And all the digests in there are pretty cool too.
(currently looking at FA.telecom digests)
Incredible, this is pure history. And fun to read.
These days there's to much spam in the newsgroups.
All the html stuph as well makes it harder and harder to skim messages.
history is an illusion caused by the passage of time and time is an illusion caused by the passage of history.
While I'm sure the entire archive will eventually be reposted here, I couldn't pass up this one from net.unix-wizards.... don't forget to look at the .sig :-)
/etc/glob was used to do the shell filename
what is a glob?
Since my introduction to the usenet, I have been bombarded with the
origins of the words "foobar", "dsw", "[v]grep", and other such
fascinating additions to the English language by computer people.
One word that *I* could never totally figure out is the word "glob".
In version 6, a program
metacharacter (* [] and ?) expansion, although this program
is not needed by the Bourne (V7) Shell. In Berkley's C-shell, the
word again pops up in the definition of "noglob", a shell variable
that inhibits the filename expansion.
What is "glob"? Who out there has an authoritative definition?
Beyond the word's definition, is it correct to use glob as a verb...
i.e. "to glob" something? With all the recent discussion of correct
grammar, I don't want to be left in the dark about proper usage of
computer jargon.
I will digestify personal responses. Please mail them directly to me.
Randal L. Schwartz (...!{decvax,ucbvax}!teklabs!tekmdp!randals)
Tektronix Microcomputer Development Products
Beaverton, Oregon (anybody out there not know how to pronounce it by now?)
* And remember, it's spelled N-e-t-s-c-a-p-e, but it's pronounced "Mozilla."
Anyway, this seems to on the borderline of legality to me. I sure wouldn't want my posts published without my permission. fortunately we have x-no-archive on Usenet.
They're mostly from institutions of higher learning or research labs, like MIT, Berkeley, PARC, Bell-Labs, etc. I found a charter post on the Net.Aviation newsgroup from Andrew Koenig of Bell-Labs who went on to write several books on C and C++. I'm sure we can find other prominent figures.
Very interesting stuff here.
-- You see, there would be these conclusions that you could jump to
.. That simply displays, each day, everything that appeared on usenet on the same day in 1981.
--
see shy jo
"Apparently Ms. Portman has a thing for a penis bird of some kind and, you can also read about the very begining of the operating system that now runs the world."
Ahh,,.. No, no spam...
Sounds cool. Kinda wierd for me since I wasn't born till 82. I bet that this would be another good place for that guy to look for computer history.
Geeky.org
Here's an interesting archive of early 80's TELECOM-Digest. Remeber, at the time, ARPAnet and Usenet were not connected. UUCPnet users had to use a bangpath (...!ucbvax!telecom), while ARPAnet could use the now-familiar CSVAX.telecom-link@Berkeley (note the lack of .edu).
TELECOM Digest
This list later became fa.telecom on Usenet. fa. groups were newsgoups ported from ARPAnet. In 1985, the group became comp.dcom.telecom when Usenet was reorganized.
---
In a hundred-mile march,
net.micro
utcsrgv!utzoo!decvax!microsof!gordon
Tue Feb 2 09:53:34 1982
XENIX - real UNIX
In response to the characterization of XENIX as a UNIX look-alike, I would like to point out that Microsoft XENIX is the real thing: A superset of Bell V7 UNIX.
We have our 3.0 distribution, and XENIX 3.0 will soon be available. Bell forces us to call it something besides UNIX (the word 'UNIX' can be used only in the context of 'the UNIX operating system'), so XENIX it is.
gordon letwin
decvax!microso
Having worked on XENIX (argh that really dates me), I remember being glad when I first saw this announcement, but not so glad after the company bought a copy. How times change....NOT.
--- Hot Shot City is particularly good.
and a post with name "HOW TO" - gives a lot of info about usenet people at the time ?. On offtopic, when did HOWTOs/Usenet FAQs first start? Which group was the first?
-Stskeeps, http://unrealircd.com
It would be interesting to see the first micrsoft related groups.
I propose a consist where the person to find the first request for porn wins (I'm not sure what they win but they do).
After reading that archive I feel this sudden urge to play rogue.
Your courageous and selfless spelling corrections have made me a better person.
... is that in such lists as the bugs.4bsd, I can understand what's going on with their operating system, 20 years later, having never touched that original code (I think). THIS is one of the beauties of UNIX.
-----
I was browsing throught the archives, and they seemed a bit empty. Not from the small number of posts, but more like a big empty hole.
I though about this for a while, then it hit me: the alt.flame, alt.duche-bag, and alt.hairy.duche-bag groups are missing enitrely! Not only that, but no SPAM!
Me, I envy those of you who had the privilage of using the internet while it was still primarily an information source, not a marketing media.
I was only about a year old when this archive was created.
Come test your mettle in the world of Alter Aeon!
This is awesome... who knew? Check out this post:
Aucbvax.1365
fa.arpa-bboard
utzoo!duke!mhtsa!eagle!ucbvax!WESTINE@USC-ISIF
Tue May 19 16:46:46 1981
RFC 780 now available
A new RFC is now available in the NIC online library at SRI-KL.
RFC 780:
Title: Mail Transfer Protocol
Author: S. Sluizer and J. Postel
Pages : 43
pathname: [SRI-KL]RFC780.TXT
Defines the new Mail Transfer Protocol (MTP) to be used for
Internet Text Mail. Designed to be used with both TCP and NCP.
Public access files may be copied from the NIC library at SRI-KL
via FTP with username NICGUEST and password ARPA.
--jon.
--Cr@ckwhore
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
tcp-ip@brl
Postel@isif
Geoff@SRI-CSL
The Deja Development Monkey said...
Of course, you shouldn't have to understand, you're just a 'consumer' of the service.
And aren't companies, even dot.coms, theoretically supposed be give at least lip service to the maxim that 'the consumer is always right'? The attitude that "mere consumers" have no need to know why corporate actions are taken is a serious problem generally, and in the specific case of Deja's removal of the Usenet archive, the 'blackout' of information as to why it was done has probably contributed to more ill feelings toward the company than the actual takedown of the archive itself.
Actually, the specific information that you just shared with us is exactly what Deja (and other companies/services) SHOULD be telling their consumers when a major change like the removal of the Usenet archive is done.
People can understand and be tolerant of the considerable issues in moving the company, compacting and transferring the data to new servers, etc... but its hard to have empathy for vague, unjustified 'reasons' and hollow platitudes 'promising' to return the archive... someday... that seem to be stonewalling and cover-up. (Which is basically all that Deja has publicly posted on the subject.)
Thanks for posting, Deja Development Monkey! Your one explanation has been more enlightening than months of emails to the company itself.
So what?
So you're acting like they've done something to harm you somehow. You have paid precisely nothing for the service, and got more then that back out. Ever hear the phrase "Beggars can't be choosers?"
Don't like Deja? Fine, invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in processors, storage, and Usenet feeds, and run your very own Usenet archive. Don't want to pay? Then tough luck. Life is hard.
Google is free, too.
What does that have to do with anything?
I am complaining about the facts that a big part of their archive has been offline for over six months now...
Gee, I guess you had better demand your money back, huh?
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Ahh... a few chapters:
1) alt.binaries: Not just for fractals anymore
2) alt.sex.bondage.particle-physics: Quarks turn you on?
3) AOL Sucks, the formative years.
I still really like USENET, though. You just have to be a little more selective about the groups you frequent. ('sci.physics' ain't what it used to be...)
Hmm, so far the longest thread I can find is it NET.movies.
The topic? The rumor that Spock dies in the new Star Trek movie!
Long live geekdom
It was April of 1994. There was spam before they hit, and the term was coined before that. Just no one did it as big as they did and were so blatant about it. Then they got a deal to write a book about it to tell others how to do it, and we all KNEW that usenet would never be the same again.
The book bombed, but others noticed and improved upon the entire idea, much to the chagrin of intelligent netizens everywhere...
Quit saying "dot dot coms" when talking about freaking website companies. Just because some marketroid ZDnet hack did it doesn't mean it's okay. It reads like a stutter and makes you sound like a drooling buzzword receptacle.
Sorry to pick on you specifically... that's been building up for a while.
utcsrgv!utzoo!decvax!microsof!gordon
Geez, even back then, Micros~1 couldn't spell their complete name!
;-)
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
I couldn't find the article where Al Gore invents the internet :)
Opinions change daily as new information arrives. Stay tuned.
Interesting... there is a complete lack of emoticons used in these posts. When were these 'invented', or were they really invented by the media during the great 'net enthusiasm of the early '90's, when television was looking for something unique about the net, and some TV exec thought "Well hey, they use these nutty little faces! Lets publicise them...". Why no emoticons... :-(
Cleanstick.org: Dumb weblog about nothing
The first group I checked out was "net.suicide." I have no personal interest in suicide but the idea of reading the potentially last words of depressed people, or the words of recovering individuals is very interesting. Here is one post that actually produced a smile though...
"Intent on suicide, Frenchman Jacques Lefevre drove a stake into the ground on the top of a cliff overlooking the sea, then tied
one end of a rope around the stake and the other end around his neck. Being nothing if not thorough Lefevre then drank a bottle of poison, set his clothes on fire, lowered himself over the cliff, and tried to shoot himself in the head. Unfortunately he missed, the bullet cut the rope in two, dropping the hapless gentleman into the
sea, where the salt water put out his flaming clothes and caused him to spew up the poison. A passing fisherman picked Lefevre up and
delivered him to a nearby hospital, where at last the weary Frenchman got his wish - and died from the effects of exposure."
Overall i envy the individuals of that day. The majority of the posts that I read were far more intelligible than what I often have to sift through in news groups.
Actually, I thought dejanews (or deja, or whatever) had gone dramaticaly down hill until a couple weeks or so ago when I found that they now have www.deja.com point at their portal-thingy, but www.dejanews.com now points directly to their usenet search. Of course, that doesn't fix everything, but it sure makes things nicer...
Posted from the wireless couch.
Aqumix.1017 net.micro utcsrgv!utzoo!decvax!ittvax!qumix!msc Fri Feb 19 12:18:04 1982 IBM PC I am trying to connect an IBM personal computer as a terminal to my vax. I have the asynchronous communications package from ibm but it is not good.
It is written in basic and is so slow that the speed of writing to the screen is about 600 baud. Also there does not appear to be any way for the vax to erase things from the screen. A backspace code from the vax is sent to the screen as a blotch (actually it looks like a tiny ace of spades). Also it uses a peculiar protocol for transferring files involving XOFF CR and XON CR which I think is going to present difficulties.
Has anyone tackled these problems yet or am I the guinea pig? I think I'm going to have to write a new terminal emulator program which is not in basic. Naturally I would be ecstatic if someone has done it already and could mail me a copy of their program.
As to the pc itself, it is a nice little box and the documentation is pretty reasonable. I have the color graphics controller, the epson printer and controller, a second disk drive, an async comms. card and full expansion of the memory on the mother board.
A word of warning: don't buy one from computerland. Mine was ordered on November 6 last year. In January I received a cpu and a keyboard with the color graphics card and the async comms. card. A b/w monitor and its controller were also ordered but have yet to arrive. We didn't even get a PC-DOS disk with the initial order. We had to badger our local computerland into copying one of their disks for us. The printer didn't arrive until a few days later and the second disk drive only arrived two days ago. A 64k memory expansion card has yet to arrive. Of course I really don't know if the problems are ibm's or computerland's. You have to make up your own mind.
In short the pc was completely unusable when first delivered due to missing key components.
Mark Callow
Canter and Seigal (sp?), sometime in the '92-94 era.<p>
That means that Spam has existed on usenet less than half of its life.
Somewhere around here, I have a C&S tour T-shirt that lists dozens of newsgroups. Funny - I can't even remember what they were posting (legal services, maybe, or a pyramid scheme), but it was like someone had thrown a rattlesnake into a little girl's teaparty... every single newsgroup seemed to drop their subject for a few days, and C&S were the object of revile and prediction of Death of the Net, F@11.<p>
Hehehe... sort of like the cries of dismay when Delphiods got connected to the net ("They'll distroy the culture we've built!") followed by, iirc, the AOLers, and then the Protigians.<p>
Somewhere in me is a little ember of anger for how usenet was destroyed, how all the (intentionally) open unix shell accounts, mail relay points, anonymous mail bouncers, and talk and finger services disappeared.<p>
And yes, I still read usenet, find good articles, and am very self aware that "the good ol' days" weren't as good as memory has it. But the "flavor" of 80's netculture will always be missed by many people who participated. (As, I'm sure 90's will be missed, and 70's nc was missed in the 80's).<p>
--<br>
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
For the simple fact that at work we aren't allowed to install any usenet programs but we can still use our browsers which means that we can use Dejanews. So it doesn't always work right, at least we got something. ;-)
net.sources
utcsrgv!utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!G:ARPAVAX:mark
Sun Apr 4 15:16:19 1982
pacman/makefile
CC = cc
# DFLAGS = -DUSG -DNODELAY
DFLAGS = -DNODELAY -DMINICURSES
CFLAGS = -O
LDFLAGS =
CFILES = pacman.c monster.c util.c movie.c
OFILES = pacman.o monster.o util.o movie.o
pacman: $(OFILES)
[snip]- index.html
You can find the rest of Pacman listed here:
http://comm unication.ucsd.edu/A-News/NET.sources/NET.sources
Including:
Subject: pacman/makefile
Subject: pacman/pacdefs.h
Subject: pacman/monster.c
Subject: pacman/movie.c
Subject: pacman/pacman.c
Subject: pacman/util.c
--
--
Play Match-It.
What do people have against Deja? I don't see what's so wrong with it... but then again I have low expectations.
I could not justify my existence if I were a turkey farmer. Would I terminate myself? Undoubtably, yes.
Complete map of the Usenet in a single post.
/. member? With everyone dating themselves by saying "I was only X years old when these were written" or "I was but a zygote back then," I'm beginning to feel ancient. I like to think that those who post span all age groups, but perhaps it's more skewed toward Generation Y (or whatever - people younger than my generation) than I thought. (For the record, I turned 8 in 1981, old enough to remember but larval enough to be totally unaware of computers until a few years later.)
Dated June 1, 1981. Imagine the time when the Usenet was small enough to sum up in a single ASCII post. It even fits onto one screen. I'm not savvy enough to break it down and analyze it, but someone out there might be able to make a few insightful comments.
Speaking of age, Good God - what is the average age of the typical
Was that out loud?
Well, you could always argue that the demise of UUNET started with the cross posts from fidonet....
Hey! FidoNET was never as bad as Usenet was. Mainly because FidoNET retained the idea of personal responsibility, and if you acted like a flaming moron, you got kicked out. If a particular node was a constant source of flaming morons, that node's feed was cut. A far cry from the anarchy and anonymous posts of Usenet, but it kept things sane.
(And yes, I can still remember my FidoNET node number: 1:324/127.4)
:-)
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
http://communication.ucsd.edu/A-News/NET.chess/81. 11.25_sri-unix.143_net.chess.html
middle game, rapidly increasing in depth as pieces are exchanged. My own view is that there will be a world computer champion in 25-40 years (Thompson thinks 25-30), which will incorporate this tactical play with an extremely large database of tens/hundreds of thousands of chess patterns, which will be used to trim the search tree and increase the depth enormously.
So I am not the only one who thinks that Deja sucks.
Can anybody point me to a good alternative? Please? I don't understand why there is no other such service, this can't be that hard to build!
EagerEyes.org: Visualization and Visual Communication