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."
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.
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!
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
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.
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
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
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien