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Great points in Usenet history
no_nicks_available writes "An article on The Register points to some of the highlights of Usenet history. "
First mention of Microsoft, GNU, Madonna, the Compact Disc, and more. It's worth a look
if only to read the first kibo post to alt.religion.kibology.
Should the USENET archives be made something of historic record, to be preserved by some non-commercial, non-governmental independent entity as a permanent record. Yes, there are privacy issues, but certainly, we have found that other forms of communication play an important role for the historian.
It seems that USENET and other digital online forums are becoming as important records of history as more traditional, non-digital means like books, newspapers, etc.
Posts, especially ones, like the Challenger, Berlin Wall, etc should be treated just like other media. In the future, and even now, historians will be using digital writings as primary sources.
Should we have a backup of this archive somewhere, before people start "removing" their own posts, etc?
There's 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
I find it interesting that the very first mention of Microsoft talks about what they've promised in a future release of their software. :-)
additionally, they are
going to add a fair amount of hardware error recovery (bad block
handling, parity and power fail interrupts, etc.), as well as record
handling, shared data segments, synchronous writing, improved
interprocess communications, networking, and languages: Pascal, BASIC,
FORTRAN, and COBOL.
Wow, if they add all that, it sounds like it would be just what their customer needs!
http://kered.org
While Slashdot has a formidable user base, I'm sure the Slashdot Effect barely registers compared to the mountains of traffic google gets every minute of every day. It is, after all, the #1 Search Engine.
Google has very intelligent people working for it and they have done an excellent job of keeping the site light and responsive!
It's a shame we are all here on Slashdot and not alt.slashdot - think how this will be lost someday when Va Linux or whatever they are called today shuts it's doors...
YES, there is a McDonald's in Hanoi Square.
with tremendous fortune, I've never said anything horribly stupid or incriminating on Usenet, under my real name.
That you could be held accountable for things that you thought dropped off the end of a bbs server into nothingness after about one week, is scary.
hopefully, the fucker will die and a someone with more creativity (hell, any creativity) will write/direct them.
PS - speaking of vapor films that suck, what happened to "Jon Katz' geeks" starring Hemos and CmdrTaco? *snicker*
Did anyone else notice how well those posts were written? No "teh", no "ur", no using the number eight to represent the sound of "ate" and no "all your base are belong to us" comments?
Couldn't of been bigger than a few megs.
Joke? Lame "first-post?" Or stupidity?
The Deja news archive, which is what Google's been operating with, covered only 4 or 5 years, I believe; so this is a massive increase to the database.
The fact is that, in recent years, spam has driven most of the content out of the non-binaries newsgroups, so the increase in useful, informative and interesting comments is even greater.
Also, for those of us who used to make a hobby of flaming, embarassing/amusing.
I survived the Dick Cheney Presidency 7 to 9 AM 7-21-07
Oi the first mention about SPISPOPD (Smashing Pumpkins Into Small Piles Of Putrid Debris) in comp.sys.pc.games.action isn't listed! For any old school gamers its a significant event. I've been searching the google archive lately for it though, and can't actually find the first post about it, anyone out there had any luck?
Yes, we all know we did it. I bet we all had that thread (or threads) that we look back at now and think, "How could I be so stupid, so immature, so... so.. what was I thinking." You can also check out friends and family members. For me it was rather sad. I found where someone posted the news that my father had died. I had no idea he was that active on newsgroups.