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Great points in Usenet history

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the wasn't-it-cool-when dept.

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.

5 of 428 comments (clear)

  1. Should USENET be considered as historic value? by Ryu2 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.
    1. Re:Should USENET be considered as historic value? by jallen02 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Easy to say until you really need a job..

      Jeremy

  2. Microsoft promises by deander2 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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
  3. Writing done proper by crivens · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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?

  4. SPISPOPD by shogun · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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?