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Usenet Co-founder Jim Ellis Dies
complex writes "Jim Ellis, one of the cofounders of Usenet, has passed away. Usenet is considered the first large information sharing service, predating the WWW by years." He was 45 years old, and died after battling non-Hodgkins lymphoma for 2 years. Usenet of course began in 1979, and is the 2nd of the 3 most important applications on the net (the first being email, and the third being the web). Truly a man who changed the world.
Back in the 80s, Usenet was the net for those of us who couldn't get on the Internet, because we didn't have the connections into DARPA (by virtue of being a defense contractor or big research university) to get on it. The only connectivity we had was 1200 baud modems (in some cases, 300 baud). The way you got on was that you had a Unix system and a modem, and a contact with someone that was willing to give you a news feed (possibly in exchange for lightening the load by feeding a couple of other folks).
Actually, you didn't even need Unix. I was at a small company that did a lot of digital signal processing, and it was a VMS shop, so we ran Usenet on top of Eunice (a Unix-on-top-of-VMS emulation that sort of worked, but had only symbolic links, no hard links). I was the guy who did the Eunice port for 2.11B news: my first involvement in what would now be called a major open source project.
Back in those days, to send mail you had to have a picture of the UUCP network topology in your head: a series of paths that would get you from here to there. There were a couple of short cuts: sites that would move messages across the country (ihnp4) or internationally (seismo, which later became uunet, the first commercial provider of news feeds).
Because of the way Usenet worked, in the days where it went over UUCP (before NNTP), it was based on personal connections and a web of trust. Things were pretty loose, but if someone ignored community norms and behaved in a way that would clearly damage the fabric of the net, they just lost their news feed and that was that. It was cheap Internet connections and NNTP that made Canter and Siegel (the first big Usenet spammers) possible. But this reliance on personal connections had its downside: some admins enjoyed being petty dictators too much. The UUCP connection between AMD and National Semi (yes, competitors fed each other news on a completely informal basis, it was a different era) was temporarily dropped because of a personal squabble between the sysadmins.
There were many other nets then that weren't the Internet: Bitnet, berknet (at Berkeley) and the like. Figuring out how to get mail around required wizardry: mixes of bang paths (...!oliveb!epimass!jbuck), percent signs, and at-signs (user%janus@ucbvax.ARPA).
The user interfaces on sites like Slashdot are still vastly inferior to newsreader interfaces, like trn and friends. I could quickly blast through hundreds of messages, killing threads I wasn't interested in, skimming to get to the meat. If only sites like Slashdot would pay more attention to what worked so well about Usenet.
<AOL>Me too</AOL>
Rest in peace, Jim. Your creation lives on.
Kibo rot-13s, greps the 'net (there's no type, he can't set!) hey there, there goes the Kiboman... and of course Serdar's still Howling Through The Wires, Dick's ARMM'ed (ARMM'd (ARRM'd...))), and I never needed Napster, because I can still get anything I want on Alice's NNTP server.
UN-altered REPRODUCTION and DISSEMINATION of this IMPORTANT Information is ENCOURAGED, ESPECIALLY to COMPUTER BULLETIN BOARDS. Just as long as it's not alt.tasteless and rec.pets.cats at the same time.
The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society (nat'l. non-profit org.) has this amazing program called Team in Training - basically, you train for an endurance event (marathon, century cycle, triathlon, etc.), and in exchange for 3-5 months of professional coaching, staff support, transportation, accomodation, and entrance fee for your event, you agree to fundraise for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society.
It's such an inspiring experience. It's totally doable - you can go from complete slothdom to finishing a marathon in just a few months. And you get to meet patients with various blood-related cancers, and hear about their experiences - after you find out what chemo & marrow transplants are like, suddenly your upcoming 14-mile run doesn't seem so hard - and you directly affect their chances of survival with every dollar you raise. It is such a good feeling, both physically and mentally, to be a part of this program.
Before You Post. You need to be made aware that your message will be forwarded and duplicated on computers all over the world, even the pink squishy ones. It has been estimated that one troll costs millions of dollars. In the case of silicon computer systems, this results in increased costs to maintain and install new hardware. In the case of pink squishy systems, it results in a decreased regard for humanity in general, and contributes to the viewpoint that there are just too many sick people out there. The dollar cost of cynicism hasn't been estimated, but there is strong evidence that it impairs the function of the pink squishy computer in ways that aren't fully understood. Are you really sure you want to post that troll? Hit x to cancel, p to post.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
The nasty thing IMHO is all the email collecting bots that wander trough ALL groups pr0n or no pr0n. A newbie has no chance to know about this and fake an email or SPAM-prove it. Many an email accounts are rendered useless by this.
Cheers.. .*shrc is
--
$HOME is where the
$HOME is where the
-- silver_p
I remember the end of the Usenet glory days (mid-90s, unfortunately just after the September That Never Ended), before it was swallowed by spam. Usenet IMHO is the place where net.culture grew up, even if it wasn't part of the Internet in the beginning. No offense to the /. community, but to those of you who never experienced it, Usenet back in the day was a place the likes of which we probably won't see again.
/. and k5 still have an echo of the old Usenet, and you likewise still get some of it on mailing lists now, but take a look through Google Groups now -- too much garbage, and the community that's there is somewhat isolated because Usenet isn't as integral to the net experience as it once was.
Places like
Two taps and a v-sign for the man -- not everyone can claim to have created a true community single-handedly.
/brian
-- .sig are belong to us!
All your
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Besides the obvious need to have respect for the dead, I feel that Jim Ellis deserves respect because he made the first internet resource that strived to create a community atmosphere. This is the model that the web boards found on many websites were based on, and certainly was an influence on the Slashdot model. Whoever made the sarcastic comment about the graves saying "make money now", I understand you were trying to be funny, but I have a hard time laughing about people who have recently died. It's hardly Jim's fault Usenet has become such a wasteland.