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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.
How big is the original first few years of Usenet?
Couldn't of been bigger than a few megs.
sure hope /. is just as available and searchable in 20 years time - its one of few very few repositories of opinion that'll give the geeks perspective on the society they helped make.
... On Usenet on November 4th, 1997.
The real Webmaven is user ID 27463. I don't rate an imposter, because my ID is such a lame-ass high number.
In the early days of UseNet (early 80's) UseNet was "transmitted" to Australia via a 9 track mag tape in the mail once a week! Saved on telecom charges (early UseNet ran over analog telco lines via dial-up modems and UUCP).
[Insert pithy quote here]
It's quite well composed: starts out slowly with a nod to the endless chocolate chip recipes, then builds towards more interesting "foods."
The release date for us humans that want to see it is
still the summer of 1983. I guess it takes that long to score
all the music, do all the film-editing, prepare all the promo
material, and all that junk.
I wish Lucas & Co. would get the thing going a little faster.
I can't really imagine waiting until 1997 to see all nine parts
of the Star Wars series.
MAN! It's 2002 almost - and we only have 4 of them out! Anyone care to predict when all 9 will be available on SuperVH-DVDRUS holographic cubes? Remember, do not think about the movie plot outside the specified viewing time or MS-AOL-DISNEY-AT&T-USGOV-TIME-WARNER will zap your brain for violating the DRM EULA!
http://kered.org
Interesting remark. There are efforts already to preserve computer hardware from ages past (look at the National Museum of American History and the Computer Museum). But I'm not aware of any efforts to preserve computer software. Or at least the software hasn't been given as much emphasis as the hardware. This can be started with the preservation of USENET materials. Other stuff that I can think of: the source code of the original PDP/11 UNIX and Linux. Hopefully, as time goes on, companies will be willing to donate the source code of their obsolete commercial software.
It seems that everyone from my parents' generation believes that Kennedy's assasination was the "defining" point of their generation. Other notable events like Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima, the Hindenberg, and the Apollo landing were important and extremely emotional events for other Americans of different generations. People from that time remember not only the events, but where they were, who they were talking to... even the clothes they were wearing and other seemingly unimportant details. We're all familar with the phenomenon. These events had impact.
For the "current" generation, those people that are children now, September 11th and Oklahoma City will likely be such defining events. The impact is staggering in the mind, and children today will realize the impact more heavily than those that are appreciably older or younger.
For me, that defining moment, that point that will always stick with me, was the Challenger disaster. I remember every detail of the moments surrounding the explosion, and even the briefest mention of those events brings those memories back in force.
That usenet posting, a simple pure description of what one person knew just moments after the explosion, brought it all back more clearly than ever before. Any footage I see today is part of a documentary, any account is a recollection by someone remembering something that happened 15 years ago. But that post was pure. There was no commentary before or after about what it meant, and it was untainted by reflection or further consideration. It just showed what one person knew.
I won't go on to talk about the importance of the internet or compare it to other media; there are other forums for that. But I can say only that I appreciate what google has done by capturing and bringing back a real history of the last 20 years.
-- Minds are like parachutes... they work best when open.
Any employer that bases their opinion of you based on something you posted years ago is probably so shortsighted/clueless themselves that I would not want to work for them.
There's 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
I actually went to college with the guy. He was a nerd's nerd, very skilled: intelligent, creative, bizarre. Also, top notch at self-promotion. His rise to internet notoriety was inevitable.
Hey Kibo, if you're reading this, remember that first Sun lab in the JEC?
Google uses over 8000 Linux systems distributed over (4? 6?) geographically and topologically diverse locations.
/.
Google's engineers know their shit. They probably barely notice a visit from
I never knew what it stood for when I typed it in, either. It was the noclip code in Doom, replaced by CLIP in Doom II. Both codes were prefixed with ID.
The fact that it is a Bad Thing to admit is part of the poignancy of the paradox, since our perceptions of truth are, in law (and in every other walk of life), tainted by the very way we ask questions. This example was most likely used because geeks are into verbal and logical paradoxes, not because they like to make light of domestic violence.
(On a related note, if I make a joke about Schrodinger's cat, it doesn't mean I think animal cruelty is funny. It's just a shared piece of geek culture that I'm sure a lot of Slashdotters would recognize.)
"Hardly used" will not fetch you a better price for your brain.
From: MOUSEKETEER (12588)
:-/
Subject: RE: Copy Perversion Hall of Shame (Re: Msg 12585)
Date: 8-SEP-20:43: Bugs & Features
I've tried my best to avoid Copy Perverted software, but I have a few around.
My own gripe is Think Educational Software for MacEdgeII, a program for drills
in math, etc. I would think that a program which is best used by sitting the
kid in front of the Mac for an hour or so to fend for himself would be easily
backed up. Kids do the darndest things, after all, and can erase a disk at
twenty feet by looking at it sideways. This sucker is so rigged, though, that
making a copy is very difficult (i.e. you need H D Utility), and the program
still only gives you the choice to "Eject" rather than "Quit", meaning a full
shutdown.
I guess you have to look at it from their standpoint, though. I expect there
are millions of little kids out there with Macs...."Hey, Bobby, wanna copy of
this nifty math study program? Boy, talk about fun!"
;-)
Alf
P.S. While we are on the subject, I noted today in the GMUGazette (St. Louis
Gateway Area Mac Users Group) that after reprinting an article title "Freeing
Excel" which gave the patch for a particular MS program, it was pointed out
to them that "to defeat copy protection, even for registered owners, is
illegal."
If only they knew
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
Message-ID: <anews.Aucbvax.6208> Newsgroups: fa.space
X-Path: utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!space
From: ucbvax!space
Date: Thu Feb 18 03:58:17 1982
Subject: SPACE Digest V2 #108
X-Google-Info: Converted from the original A-News header
>From OTA@S1-A Thu Feb 18 03:27:49 1982
SPACE Digest
Volume 2 : Issue 108
[Ed. cut many lines of geeky space banter]
Date: 15 February 1982 03:59-EST
From: Jerry E. Pournelle <POURNE at MIT-MC>
Subject: Lunar colony and SPS plan
To: REM at MIT-MC
cc: SPACE at MIT-MC
The L-5 Society, using member talent including Dr. David Criswell and other lunar experts, plus SUNSAT people, plus some architects, plus human fctors types, will begin a "Project Deadalus"-like design of a Lunar colony as part of the L-5 Space Citizens conference at teh Hyatt Los Angeles Airport over weeken of 2-4 April.
What's interesting about this isn't just that it was posted by Jerry Pournelle, but also that he manages to leave the 'd' off of "weekend" and the "teh" after "over." Among other glaring tyops. Of course, it was four in the morning.
Wow. Goodbye Nethack, hello prehistoric USENET archives...
I wonder if we can force the USPTO to look at the USENET archive?
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
UUCP email specified the full route. The email address of the poster, in full, was: utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!mhtsa!ihnss!houxi!houxs!hansen which means this:
The news server this message was retrieved from is utzoo. The message came to utzoo from decvax, and from there from ucbvax, and from there from mhtsa, and from there from ihnss, and from there from houxi, and from there from houxs which was directly connected in some manner to hansen (perhaps hansen is a user on houxi; the important thing though is that houxi knows what hansen is).
so, if you want to send hansen email, and you're currently using ucbvax, then you send email to mhtsa!ihnss!houxi!houxs!hansen for example. If you're on a system that isn't in the bang-path, then you have to know the way to a system that is.
This is why MX-type Internet email got very popular very fast. However, sendmail still supports UUCP delivery, though most sane people compile it out.
my old sig used to be funny, but then slashcode ate it and now it's not funny anymore
Man, 1997 was a different world.
One thing you want to consider is the release of Microsoft Word 6.0 in (IIRC) 1994. That was the release that pioneered the "autocorrect" feature which, by default, converts "teh" to "the". So, tens of millions of people who began using computers after that began using "teh" without even realizing it. This "feature" is so ubiquitous now that even my IRC client (xchat) supports it.
That, of course, would be the beginning of its prevalence, not of its use. It is something that has been happening, for sure, since the introduction of the qwerty keyboard in the 19th century (to slow down typists and prevent jams...).
"(Man) tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story. But you have to choose: live or tell." --Sartre
Bleh forget your old posts, embarassment is part of reflection of youth. Its googles reverse phone number search that irks me. They have an option to remove your number from their database, I just wish I could remove just the address portion.
-- Button up, your ignorance is showing
...here
I think that this is one of the more interesting posts that I have found.
I decided to go hunting for noteworthy appearances in Usenet history myself and found this posting:
7 .2 1.NEUMANN%40KL.SRI.COM
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=1245494618
It's the first mention of Kevin Mitnick I can find (1986) but I know he was poking around before then. Anyone find anything earlier?
liB
Reid wrote:
.signature. I'm embarassed enough by the .signatures they DO have. You can even see the one I had before I realized I should only use .signatures ironically and made it 250 times longer. You can watch it grow! Although I don't know why anyone would want to.
> Hey Kibo, if you're reading this, remember that first Sun lab in the JEC?
Of course. It arrived the same summer as Podular, if I recall correctly.
I even remember being almost banned from that PAWL lab because I thought the "PAWL##.pawl.rpi.edu" names were boring so I made up names for all 23 machines and slapped stickers on them when nobody was around just to see if they'd get adopted. (I couldn't decide what naming scheme to use, so I named a third of the machines after science-fiction novelists, a third after cartoon sound effects, and I forget about the other third.)
Google even has a few of the posts I made from PAWL17 and PAWL23 and so on, plus a small fraction of the ones from MTS and Brazil. In late 1988 or possibly late 1987, Brazil was the first machine I used for Usenet access (RPI-ACM's 3B2) and then later it was the PAWLs and Sandro's *Forum-to-Usenet gateway. It was sometime during those years (probably around '87 or '88) that Mark-Jason Dominus (most likely, unless it was Todd McComb) said "There should be Kibology!" while we were at China Pagoda, and little did he realize that I was going to base the rest of my life on those four words. (Todd had a more concise, two-word philosophy -- "You're allowed!" -- which also warped me for life.)
Before Usenet, I had a conference on MTS's *Forum named "Kibo", I recall. I don't have the nine-track tape archive any more, but some printouts do exist of some of the, um, what's the word for stuff that doesn't have any highlights?
I like to think of 1985-1988 (my *Forum and Bitnet years) and 1988-1991 (my pre-alt.religion.kibology Usenet years) as the period when my articles were never worth reading, as opposed to now when they're only MOSTLY never worth reading.
The Google archive is quite spotty for my early years. They don't have my first month's worth from alt.religion.kibology, and they seem to be confused between the first posting I made from Schenectady (12/91) and my first posts to a.r.k (11/91).
(Plus a lot of people seem to have assumed I wasn't posting before that, even though Google has some articles I posted in 1988.)
Amusingly, in Google's list of their choice of 20 points in Usenet history, they identify the 12/91 article as my first a.r.k post, but the same sentence links to a page displaying the actual first article. (The one with almost half an attempt at some sort of onomatopoesis referring to Gene Spafford for reasons I can't remember.)
But at least Google doesn't have any articles from that one week I had a giant sword in my
I've been lucky enough to have the same E-mail address for over ten years, which also helps if you're actually trying to turn up my junk in the archive. The articles from before 1991 are harder to find because of all the weird permutations of Bitnet and UUCP addresses...
By the way, I don't read SlashDot.
-- K.
The first mention of Slashdot
Slashdot back in 1997.
The evidence:
/. really need to sort this out pronto. Even if the editors dont bother reading there own website, the could at least have the decency to search the archives from the last couple of weeks for duplicates before posting.
1. Unoriginal headlines!
2. Repeated Stories
3. VA Linux --> VA software
4. Editors dont even bother reading the homepage
5. Editors dont post anymore
6. Threats of subscription
7. Threats of more intrusive advertising
--and finally, the real killer--
8. The trolls are becoming really quite imaginitive, original and funny.
Seriously though, for every duplicate story i'm sure there is a real peach missed.