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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.
The end of the world as we knew it ended on Sept. 11. 1989
i think the weirdest message i ever remember from my old usenet days was
"new group found: do you wish to subscribe to 'alt.sex.hello-kitty' ?(y/n)"
I believe sex is highly over rated... unless it involves me
Hrm, haven't we seen this already? Okay, so now the Register has an article, but it adds nothing. Woo. Go Slashdot. Bah.
I found this hilarious.
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.
I wonder if that e-mail address still works so I can let him know that Episode 1 wasn't worth it...
... 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]
When he announced his project:
I can (well, almost) hear you asking yourselves "why?". Hurd will be out in a year (or two, or next month, who knows)
;)
python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
But they forgot the most important one!
first post to mention Slashdot.
First post to mention Slashdot.org
The fools!
--
What happens when you outlaw guns
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
The scary part is that many people (including myself) have posted many, MANY messages to USENET, not realizing that 20 years later those same messages would be staring us back in the face.
Many tech employers do a web search of candidates they are considering hiring... in many cases, it tells you a lot more about the person than the person is willing to reveal in the formal interview process. At least on a web page of your own creation you have the ability to tear it down and recreate it as you see fit. Newsgroups are forever. If you posted strong opinions to a political forum or to a religious forum under your own name (probably before you realized there were spambots or USENET archives), then those messages will very heavily influence that HR person's opinion of you.
Similarly, there are many support groups on USENET. People with medical problems have posted to medical support groups in good faith. Granted, you already know that you are posting private information in a public forum, but probably nobody who does expects to see it archived for all eternity and for the curious to be able to pull it up decades later.
I did a little vanity surfing on Google's USENET archives, and it was both amusing and frightening. Amusing because it was a voice from the past reminding me exactly of who I was at the time. Frightening because there are many posts where I express a strong point-of-view.
Bear in mind, also, that the logistics of maintaining a recent 6 month archive of newsgroups back in 1995 was daunting for any ISP; I never dreamed that the entire USENET would be archived from 1981 because the storage costs were enormous. Now we've reached a point where storage costs are trivial.
OTOH, I can imagine what a tremendous resource this will be for future generations doing geneological research... but only partially so. Much of the internet community has wised up and now only post under psuedonyms.
-----
Hahaha..
From: Vincent Weaver (weave@Glue.umd.edu)
Subject: NT 5.0
Newsgroups: um.wam
Date: 1997/11/18
I just saw at www.slashdot.org (an intersting news site) that it was
announced at Comdex that Windows NT 5.0 won't be shipping until 1999. I
find that sort of amusing. Linux will probably be at revision 3.0 by then
;) Seriously though. Often when I complain about a NT4.0 "feature" I get
told "just wait 5.0 will have that fixed and more..." but I guess MS is
falling behind...
Anyone have a slightly more revised estimate?
Dyolf Knip
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.
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?
"Because you can't see the person who is sending you electronic mail you are sometimes uncertain whether they are serious or joking. Recently, Scott Fahlman at CMU devised a scheme for annotating one's messages to overcome this problem. If you turn your head sideways to look at the three characters :-) they look sort of like a smiling face. Thus, if someone sends you a message that says "Have you stopped beating your wife?:-)" you know they are joking."
;-)"
And then you answer "Yep, I gave a break to her since she's still choking on her blood.
And then you both have a huge laugh.
Man, people from the 80s are weird.
They missed this milestone, the second post from AOL:
From: aluser@aol.com (aluser@aol.com)
Subject: Re: Is America Online Connected to the Internet or Not?
Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom
Date: 1992-05-05 13:45:06 PST
> I have read many postings about America Online and the Internet in
> this newsgroup. Since some of the information has been not quite
> right I figured I should make a posting to clear up any misconseptions
> that might exist. There is an America Online gateway to Internet. It
> is now going into 'open' beta testing. To send mail to an America
> Online, Promenade or PC-Link user you need to know the user's screen
> name. The only way to get a user's screen name is to contact them by
> other means (ie there is no name server). Once you know a user's
> screen name remove any spaces, make it lower case, and append
> @aol.com. For example to send to the screen name A User you would
> address your mail to auser@aol.com.
>
> To send mail from America Online to the Internet you simply put the
> Internet address in the To: field on the regular mail form. In a
> previous post the question was posed as to whether or not there are
> 'special' gateways for Compuserve, MCI Mail etc. The answer is no,
> there are not. For some of the more popular services abbreviations
> have been created; for example to send to a Compuserve user you can
> use the address 123.4567@cis. Additional information can be found on
> America Online by using the keyword InetBeta. There is no additional
> charge for using the Internet mail gateway. Mail is limited to around
> 27k bytes in both directions. If you notice any problems with this
> gateway please send mail to inetbeta1@aol.com from the Internet or
> inetbeta from America Online.
>
>
> George Browning Programmer/Analyst gbrowning@aol.com
>
> ** BETA TEST MAIL Report bugs to INetBeta1@aol.com **
me too
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
First Derek Smart post - scroll down to see the first anti-Derek Smart flame.
Kibology predates alt.religion.kibology by quite some time. Find the first postings to alt.religion.subgenius, for a true beginning. James "Kibo" Perry was quite a presence back then, along with the legendary Henry Spencer from utzoo.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
The edlin editor remains a classic of cruftiness. It still crashes on
files without carriage returns. In the same article Bill Gates said:
"There's really a lot of dirty software on the market now; we'll have to
educate the developers about how to write better software." Judging by
DOS 2.0, edlin, and Microsoft Pascal, it would appear that Microsoft
will have to look outside their organization for suitable teachers.
they knew MS made crapy software back then too!!!!
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
Hmm, the first BOFH immediately follows the first AOL post.
.".
Coincidence? You decide.
-Peter
PS: Please feel free to not post "BOFH is about an operator, and since you obviously don't even know what a real computer was in those days . .
-P
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.
Still looking for Al Gore's original post, the one where he presents his blueprints for the Internet.
Nice troll, that's not the link to the first Slashdot mention of Google. If the moderators would pay attention and do their job, they'd notice its something completely different.
This is the link you're looking for.
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.