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."

Comments

Bill Joy!

[grappler]

From net.rumors:


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"

paper on usenet early days

[J.J.]

There was a researcher from Columbia that used this archive as one of the major sources for her paper Early Usenet. It's not the most well-researched article, and if it was written by a techie I'd be surprised, but it's a good job of collecting together a lot of the gems from the archive.

For instance:

Often queries would be posted on Usenet asking others for
information or advice. This would make it possible to build on
other's experience. For example, one poster wrote, "does anybody
know of an Arpanet (BBN-1822) interface for the Intel Multibus
IEEE standard 796. We could always back up Ron Crane's old
parallel port interface, but would prefer something already done
on the slim chance that it happens to exist." (9) Hoping to work
collaboratively with others who were interested, the poster
continued, "It just occurred to me that a SUN workstation would
make a dandy Arpanet Ethernet gateway. Is there anybody else out
there in internet land who might want to share efforts." (10)

Enjoy.
J.J.

Visonary

[MyopicProwls]

MyopicProwls
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

Echelon vs Slashdot

[Baldrson]

after giving up on Dejanews in disgust. (Does anyone think they don't suck these days?)

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.

Ah, those were the days.

[FFFish]

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.


--

Cracking: 19 years, saaaame story.

[zCyl]

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!

Mmmm.......seems familiar.

[E V I L G E E K]

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.

What's there and not there...

[Fervent]

I find interesting what's there and not there. Hockey, my favorite sport, had its own newsgroup before basketball (yet had no posts yet). There is a user group for UNIX and BSD, but no Linux. There is no Apple newsgroup.

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?)

Find your own posts

[Krilomir]

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 :)

first documented root shell.. and script kiddie!

[semis]

From this gem in the net.unix-wizards group:

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)
... What's the straight scoop? What is this magic method? I would appreciate it if you would respond via "mail" instead of broadcasting it.

Overclocking in 1981! ;-)

[ghoti]

Check this out (it's about the strongest chess computer at the time):

The secret of the Elite's strength is its cpu: a 4 mhz 6502! In order to pull off this trick, Fidelity cannot produce the Elite in mass quantites, and requires special orders which deliver it direct from the factory. They sift through thousands of 6502's to find one that runs a bit fast, attach a heat sink, and then turn up the clock rate.

Bruahahahaha ...

And he went on to design the Pentium!

[Money__]

This one reminds me of the "math problem" on pentium 60/75/90

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.

IBM PC

[Money__]

This one is classic

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

Found a good one

[D_Fresh]

Complete map of the Usenet in a single post.

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 /. 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.)

Re:First reviled Spam

[JabberWokky]

.
Oh, yeah... and all that was before HTML. ;)

---

I remember the first Spam that was really Spam - in other words, it was a person who didn't care about usenet, crossposted through everywhere, and was just posting commerical ads.

Canter and Seigal (sp?), sometime in the '92-94 era.

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.

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.

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.

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).

--
Evan