Slashdot Mirror
Google's 20-Year Usenet Timeline
theRG writes "Google just released its 20-Year Usenet Timeline. Among the highlights: First Mac rumor, first 'me too' post, Tim Berners-Lee's announcement of the Web, and Linus' announcement of Linux."
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
first post! I probably failed it
Monstar L
"11 Dec 2001 Google offers 20-year Usenet Archive" Where did we get the word "just" ????
From Linus' announcement:
I can (well, almost) hear you asking yourselves "why?". Hurd will be out in a year (or two, or next month, who knows), and I've already got minix.
The Hurd. Beautiful.
given that both the US government and the UN list the Sudanese government as one of the worlds 2 or 3 worst human rights violators, on a par with Iraq's (See, for example, the New York Times, Mar 11 1993
It's incredibly amazing how much insight the poster of the first "Osama bin Laden" usenet post must have had back in 1993. In 2005, among the top stories of the year: USA+Iraq, Tsunami, the Sudan Crisis and the lack of USA involvement.
Sigh...
Don't think that a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. It's the only thing that ever has.
"You feel like you've been here before." --More--
I enjoyed the Linux announcement, classic.
I think I've seen this before... i know I have... I tought slashdot pointed me to it... must have been wrong...
Heh, this was reported on Slashdot over ago...
Expect a call from Apple Legal. Steve doesn't like having his surprises ruined.
"Hurd will be out in a year or two" - Linus
It cracks me up every time.
Someone hunt down and kill that "Me too" guy with AOL CDs.
"Heh" -Linus Torvalds 05 Oct 1991
I love him for that..
Reference the last story about predictions.
Google drops Usenet.
Pete Carr Owner Chatmag.com
It's not worth a cracker 'cause it doesn't have my first Usenet post, back in December '87.
May 1983 - All hail Bob!! :-)
I didn't know the church of the subgenius went back that far, though.. very interesting stuff.
42
or I don't want to post there to offer a spam target
utilities/library functions for minix. If your efforts are freely
distributable (under copyright or even public domain), I'd like to hear
from you, so I can add them to the system. I'm using Earl Chews estdio
right now (thanks for a nice and working system Earl), and similar works
will be very wellcome. Your (C)'s will of course be left intact. Drop me
a line if you are willing to let me use your code.
It's no accident that Linux was such an pleasant project to hack on way back when, Linus is just such a humble and polite person. He still is today. What ever happened to that? These days you're lucky to get a reply to an email when offering to contribute code to an open source project, let alone someone actually thanking you for going to the effort of making something for others to enjoy.
How we know is more important than what we know.
if you mean "just released" in the Slashdot way, e.g. over three years ago.
The link "Stallman's announcement of GNU" is broken. It reports that "there is no group named net.usoft.".
I'm particularly fond of their
current map of usenet done with ascii art.
I'll give $5.00 to the first person to provide an updated ascii art usenet map.
PS: There unfortunately was no mention anywhere in Google's archive of Mark Miller's right-shift-one of the Xanadu vocabulary, which turned Project Xanadu into Project Babel.
Seastead this.
You know there's some guy named Phil Nelson in a bar somewhere with a printout of Torvalds' usenet post, and he's like "yeah baby, he's talking about ME!"
It's been over 3 years since this page went up!
From the linked page:
11 Dec 2001 Google offers 20-year Usenet Archive
Don't forget to change your font to VT100 for that ol' tyme feel. And maybe set the display to green text on black.
These are some of the things molecules do...... given 4 billion years -Carl Sagan
...where is the first "First post!!!1one"?
THIS IS THE INTERNET. PLEASE PICK UP YOUR SERIOUS BUSINESS SUIT AT THE FRONT COUNTER.
On the WWW announcement:
"This summary does not describe the many exciting possibilities opened up by the WWW project, such as efficient document caching, the reduction of redundant out-of-date copies,..."
Glad to see that those "out-of-date copies' have been reduced. I don't think I could imagine how many out of date documents there would be in the world if we didn't have the web.
I'm suprised though that they didn't see the exciting possiblities opened up for online porn. Guess nobody saw that one coming.
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
"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."
Ha!
2005: Slashdot 'just' posts an article about something Google did in 2001
Slashdot dutifully reported this three years ago as well, with the same exact link.
Someone care to elaborate? This is well before my time.
What is your penile percentile?
It appears the link to the GNU announcement is broken.
Also, I have concrete evidence that Microsoft innovates. Once upon a time, the idea of an email virus was a joke:
Folks, THIS IS A HOAX! IT IS IMPOSSIBLE (I REPEAT) IMPOSSIBLE to transfer a virus via ascii txt/email that will erase your hard drive.
Thanks to Microsoft, we can now enjoy viruses via the miracle of email!
Given that the first Mac rumour post is from 1982, I make that at least 23 years of archive.
I like the Y2K prediciton one. http://groups-beta.google.com/group/net.bugs/brows e_frm/thread/64696a1b035aab72
I didn't realize it was predicted so long ago.
From the first mention of "Return of the Jedi":
I can't really imagine waiting until 1997 to see all nine parts of the Star Wars series.
How about waiting until 2005 to see the first six?
Anyone want to jump on the usenet map where ucbvax!mark left off?
and,
The first impression after following the links is how weird the new google groups look. The whole censorship of the original emails is enough to destroy any sense of "history" in the posts.
I would rather prefer a "perfect" archive, where anyone looking could get a copy of the intact document that was posted at that time.
I wonder if a balance can be achieved between email harvesting and protecting the original documents.
The link 'Sep 1983 Stallman's announcement of GNU' doesn't appear to work, but if you search google groups for '771@mit-eddie.UUCP' you can find it.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Bill Gates posted to net.micro on July 22, 1983 from microsoft.uucp (from the account of Gordon Letwin, although he signs it as himself) talking about his crazy days at Harvard where he learned to do PEEKs and POKEs (cool, If I was using my Commodore-64 right now I'd do a POKE 53281,6 in honor of Bill)
Clearly no one saw the 2003 at the bottom of the page.
The replys would be worth a great laugh since spamming was so abominable back then.
Also the first goatse.cx pic on slashdot and its replies for those who have never seen it might be hilarious as well.
Trolling is immature I know but I remember a few of the replies like "GOOOD SFDS*&^~!"
I think slashdot posted this article 2 years ago with other links like the first IBM pc and a new os called dos. Good stuff.
http://saveie6.com/
They missed the first "/. editors are morons" post. Oh wait, I saw that on /. over three years ago. Dupe.
me too?
They didn't find the post about the first "blue screen" in a Microsoft Windows product.
I've been using usenet since 89, seen many different usenet programs and web interfaces. Just for the heck of it, I tried to search some old amiga/commodore groups, and early fido/bbs groups, what a lack of searchs. I did some searchs back before google took over, and Deja had those posts, google seems to be missing information.
Search by reverse date is missing.
Threaded and hourly view is missing, too much crap on the screen.
Side bars in the way. (Again more crap)
Pretty much, I browse a few groups, but with perlmonks and other major discussion groups going to forums and leaving usenet, its more of a legacy I still enjoy than can use.
Always wished people using bbforums would have an archived usenet feed just to keep a history. Also you dont need to belong to the forum.
I feel forum's killed usenet, and forums are rather weak.
How many forums are you on? Slashdot and about 6 dozen more.
While im glad Google has taken over, I wish they could at least make a forum interface that doesnt suck.
What the hell? This "news item" is is 3 to 4 years old, and the VERY FIRST LINE of the article says that the "20 years" are from 1981 to - we'll need mathematics here - 2001! (If you're wondering, we're in the year 2005 now.)
That page has been there forever, I've visited it multiple times a long time ago and I'm certainly not the only one.
I'm sorry, it's just that sometimes I wonder what the editors are doing in this site. It's not rocket science, dammit.
Peace
The first Mentifex AI post was also twenty years ago.
I don't get it
In 1993, a group of Qaeda-networked assholes based out of Sudan bombed the WTC. What's amazing to me, a New Yorker, is that Giuliani was on duty both that day, and in 2001, when bin Ladin's Qaeda finally succeeded in destroying the WTC, and Giuliani emerged as a hero. Rather than the guy who let bin Ladin get away with it twice. And then used his hero status to back a war in Iraq, rather than finishing the war in Afghanistan, with his own NYC Police Chief, Kerik, running the security disaster in Iraq. How do any of these guys, including bin Ladin, keep their jobs with such lethally catastrophic performance?
--
make install -not war
This is our history. Yet, nothing in there about poor Slashdot.
Your ad here.
Hope they are honest about that part of usenet history...
Nov 4, 1997
This will link to it: http://tinyurl.com/6sz2j
Why is it in a strange language?
First English mention is Nov 14, 1997.
http://tinyurl.com/5snrm
Where's first mention of Al Gore announcing that he invented the Internet? You can't live the "founding father" of the Internet off the timeline. :P
scheme hosed them too. That timeline is old.
(didn't look at the thread, just grumbing about the groops interface chaneges..)
Blogging because I can...
wants to see what is there already? http://www.newzbin.com/
This Sig is removed due to factual inaccuracy
This surely is the longest-apart dupe story ever.
It's only sort of a dupe. The timeline wasn't *directly* mentioned in the original article.
That said, I think we need to award a 5 yard penalty against the editor for not following the proper rules when posting a dupe (i.e. one must post blatant dupes - any attempt to be clever is against the rules and is very much frowned upon).
Funny, in the first ever linux post, he referes to a previous post about it :)
Do it doug.
11 Dec 2001 Google offers 20-year Usenet Archive
Slashdot you are only 3 years late.
btw, this (from Linus) is interesting:
>2. PORTABILITY
"Portability is for people who cannot write new programs"
-me, right now (with tongue in cheek)
I bet you're hitting your head right now Linus...
"wivax!evans Dec 21 1982, 4:52 am show options
The disease sounds very frightening. I had heard about it about two weeks ago. Seems like the public should be more aware of it. Anybody have any info on it? Barry Evans"
Did that creep the fuck out of anyone else?
Snippet from this Usenet post from 1982:
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.
1997?!?
I'll try and post news here from time to time if it
seems like it might interest people - for instance, it looks as if the HHGG
movie is finally coming after the shelf after 10 years.
This post was made in 1993.
The ______ Agenda
Somehow I find it funny that Google provides a "reply"-link for usenet-posts from 1985.. :o)
Remember, there are no stupid questions. But there are a lot of inquisitive idiots.
At about time stamp 0:50 of the video from CNN's Wolf Blitzer March 9, 1999 Late Edition/PrimeTime interview with Al Gore you will watch Al Gore claim that he "took the initiative in creating the Internet"
"We sleep soundly in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm."
- George Orwell (?)
I believe Juanita
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
[Oct 4 1993, 10:25 am]
"I'll try and post news here from time to time if it seems like it might interest people - for instance, it looks as if the HHGG movie is finally coming after the shelf after 10 years."
Heh.
Flying is easy, just throw yourself at the ground and miss. -Douglas Adams
now lets find some rms entries on alt.sex.amateur.nasal or something :D
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
I wish Windows were more compatible with the Apple Macintosh.
Steve Jobs
>>I wish Windows were more compatible with the
>>Apple Macintosh.
>>
>>Steve Jobs
Me too!
William Gates
This wasn't just released. I saw it a while ago.
"It was like a dream come true," said Britney, who has
wide-set brown eyes and a broad smile. "It was all I'd really
wanted since I was 8. They called on the phone and said, 'You're
going to be a Mouseketeer,' and I just started screaming. 'I'm so
excited, I'm so excited,' and jumping up and down."
-snip-
The Mouseketeers don't wear Mouse
ears and uniforms; they wear colorful, stylish clothes. They sing
the old theme ("M-I-C -- 'see you real soon' -- K-E-Y -- 'Why?
Because we like you' -- M-O-U-S-E"), but follow with a song that
has a hip-hop beat and lyrics like "MMC is always in the groove!"
It was like a dream come true
It was all I'd really wanted
I'm so excited
I'm so excited
and jumping up and down
M-I-C -- see you real soon
K-E-Y -- why?
Because we like you!
M-O-U-S-E
MMC is always in the groove!
Hmmm, this is turning out to be on par on Britney's other songs!
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Commercial newsgroup providers advertise a 50+ days retention and 99+% completeness of the alt.binaries stuff. Google has exactly none. I'm sure that collectively we could find one or two instances where access to past binary content would be useful, past the obvious I'm sure I've already seen the same girl before or there was this game 10 years ago...
Yeah this story is old but I noticed in the advanced search option (for the first time) that I can sort by date. Found out my very first (documented) usenet post was 23 Nov 1994 06:53:17 GMT to comp.lang.c++. Wow - it really doesn't seem that long ago. Of course, the S/N ratio was already pretty bad and BIX (my service provider) was a far more useful resource.
Alas poor BIX... sniff
langaAir Flight Training Career / Accelerated Pilot Training Deferred payment option.
Fly at Eagle Aircraft Finance Your Flight Training. Chicago area career & recreational
Airline Training Programs $37,995 / 90 Days / Actual Jet Exp. 200 Hrs / 7 Ratings / Nationwide XC
Terrorists welcome?
From the First review of the IBM-PC
For $ 1,565 you get a keyboard and logic unit with 16K RAM and a Basic interpreter in 40K ROM. A cassette interface is built in, I think; but no diskette or monitor at this price -- you use your TV set... A "business configuration" with 64K, dual diskettes, printer, and "color graphics" goes for about $4,500.
Yikes! Hard to imagine people bought those things!
The first dupe?
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
This is *old* news. That list has been around since about 2002, pretty much unchanged. If you think of everything that's happened since 9/11, you'd expect a few more things in that timeline.
Never email donotemail@WeAreSpammers.com
"Good grief!" said I. "What happens in January of 1980?" She turned pale and admitted she had considered that before but managed to put it out of her mind. "So why not go ahead and fix it now?" I asked.
She pointed out that fixing it would require expanding the demand deposit master record format, a mammoth undertaking. About a billion COBOL programs would have to be recompiled. At this shop we were still on cards and a rush compile took about a week. "You want to do that?" she inquired. This time I turned pale. We onsidered our options, knowing that one or the other of us would be called upon to fix the problem. And you know what we did?
First, I modified the daily demand deposit program with code that checked for the date and about mid-1979 started printed warnings on the console of what would happen come new year. Then the systems analyst and I got new jobs. This is known as stepwise interactive development."
Can't you take a hint??
Stop trying to get in touch with me!!
It's OVER. Just get over it.
I'm sure in time you'll agree this was the best thing to do.
Moving on,
Phil
How I met the girl who is now my wife.
First msg is from my wife, I'm not one of the people who replied in the thread.
Don't forget the infamous Chuckletrousers post...
If I remember right, it brought about Dave Barry's departure from usenet.
In this article? In...2001? It's very neat, of course, but...
... and have some spare time. Do a groups search for Linus and check out some of the conversations going on in the newsgroups circa 91, 92, when people were still trying to really help eachother and explain things thoroughly. Not that people aren't trying to help others now, there's just a lot more noise. And, just for fun, find a reference to Linus talking about his days programming on Vic-20's. :)
sigs are like a box of chocolates, they all suck remove the underscores to email me
Sure enough, there I am... a total Amiga fanboi. My favorite thread from that era is one where I made a typo ("add" vs. "ad" for advertisement, abbreviated), and someone flamed me for it. That person had a "to" vs "too" typo in their sig and some kind person flamed them for that.
Ah, those mere much more innocent days.
The CB App. What's your 20?
That of the 800 million messages half were signed by kibo and the other half written by mnemonic.
Well, this is great and all, but their archive is way too incomplete to really make statments like this is the first post mentioned this or that. Just looking at my own posts from even 10 years ago I can see huge gaps of stuff they just don't have. Hell, just pick an early thread and look at all the posts that have another post quoted, but the original post is not there.
Basically this is a repost more than 3 years old but at least the Last-Modified date shows "Thu, 23 Sep 2004 17:41:48 GMT". Still, there's no reason why this has to be news.
It seems that Microsoft was a decent company in the past. What happened to you Bill?! :P
Sadly, the historic threads are becoming more and more cluttered with messages posted through the new Google Groups 2 interface. In their infinite wisdom, Google decided to drop the 1 month limit of replying and you can for example see the effect of this in the Linux annoucement thread.
Marcel
...this entire post is a troll? The submitter's blog is about penis pills, fer chrissakes.
I can't believe I let that one slip! How perfect is that?
The CB App. What's your 20?
This is the first announcement for my favorite multiplayer internet game, The Last Outpost. It is hard to believe that it has been up and running the net for nearly 13 years. According to the Google timeline, that sucker predates the web! Anyway, the game is still free to play, and still a lot of fun.
They've also got a list up on the game's website of other game servers on the internet that have stood the test of time that are worth checking out too. How the heck can anyone run a server for that long?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
"His email is at least fairly focused. I imagine people who work on things that are more user facing (GNOME, KDE etc) must get a whole lot of stuff coming their way..."
:>
Hey! When will KDE and GNOME merge?
Not going to happen. One space reasons. Two copyright reasons (you can thank people who abused copyright for that one).
There is probably some deep psychological meaning to be derived. Although not by the current state of the 'art' of analysis. And certainly not at those prices.
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
So, here' the announcement of PGP on June 7, 1991.
The story behind the actual release is amusing too. Kelly Goen wanted to make sure the word got out, so he drove to a payphone, upload it to a server, and called Jim Warren of Microtimes in case someone bumped him off: Here's a copy of Jim's amusing description, along with his visit by the Feds.
My favorite quote: On a weekend around the first of June, Goen began uploading complete PGP to systems around the U.S. He called several times, telling me his progress.
He was driving around the Bay Area with a laptop, acoustic coupler and a cellular phone. He would stop at a pay-phone; upload a number of copies for a few minutes, then disconnect and rush off to anoth er phone miles away.
He said he wanted to get as many copies scattered as widely as possible around the nation before the government could get an injunction and stop him.
I thought he was being rather paranoid. In light of the following, perhaps he was just being realistic.
I replied to this thread explaining that we no longer say "Microsoft" but "Micro$oft". Hopefully everyone gets the message
I actually miss the early Dejanews interface and search capabilities. It had some arcane limitations, but it was more expressive than what I can do with Google.
And I don't see evidence that people have largely learned the lesson from when Dejanews went away and Google had not yet brought up Deja's database -- the lesson being that Usenet is of value and Usenet article collections need to be mirrored and kept up to date by multiple independent administrators. Placing all of those metaphorical eggs in one basket is very risky. Doubly ironic when one considers that decentralization is one of the hallmarks of netnews. With all the bright people thinking up ways to host mirrors of files in varied places in P2P networks, I would have imagined someone would have done so for Usenet articles by now.
Digital Citizen
here.
$400?!? Holy crap
Send/track messages to 100K people: www.xPressAlert.com
it says "early post by BIFF"; who's BIFF?
Incidently, my handle predates the web and was chosen for kibo'esque reasons - I can search for it and find myself.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
That's why I haven't posted for the past few weeks anyway. It reads OK, but whenever I post it says "message XXXX not found" in red so I'm waiting for them to fix that.
... the dinette set that shook the world?!
http://tinyurl.com/44lcw
...break it.
;)
as a sort-of-pointy-hair-type, i find this quite amusing:
"Are you finding it frustrating when everything works on minix? No more all-nighters to get a nifty program working? "
so basically, because minix was working just fine - he created a new project just because
I KNOW I KNOW
Anyone know?
"sweet dreams are made of this..."
Spot down the bottom: ©2003 Google
Cool, but not new.
...flogging a dead horse's decomposed and almost dissolved mummified carcass (i.e. OLD) by reusing old jokes doesn't happen in every other story. Here's a suggestion. Read the second newest story on slashdot. Post the same jokes in the newest stories. Seems to work for the humorbots (and no, the 5.0 in futurama was way better) here.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
- First Soviet Russia joke
- First lame FP attempt
- First Kent Brockman "New Overlords" joke
- First Beowulf cluster joke
- First GNAA troll
- First BSD is dying troll
I could go on.When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
The story is about Google's timeline of Usenet, not about the archive being made available. Yes it's old, but not three years old.
I cannot reply to the "first Mac rumor" usenet post from 1982. I emplor the slashdot community to help me find a way of posting a warning to the geeks of 1982. We CAN change EVERYTHING!!! Victory!
And almost 14 years later, I'm compiling the 2.6.10 kernel.
Too bad CERN doesn't put up a server at the addresses in Berners-Lee's announcement... it would be really cool to be able to go back in time and pull down an historical document from a link in another historical document.
this one: http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html.
(in the WWW announcement)
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
His fingers and tongue at some point lacerated his own brain to death to spare themselves the indiginities of the stupidity of communicating like a "Special Olympics" winner.
They didn't put in Kremvax - the greatest net hoax ever !!! :-)
It was about "Lisa", not the Mac.
Even Steve knew the Lisa was a dumb idea, and that's good enough for me.
Clinton in mentioned and the Bush(s) were not.
gotta love this " I can (well, almost) hear you asking yourselves "why?". Hurd will be out in a year (or two, or next month, who knows)"
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
All of the links in Tim Berners-Lee's post are broken! What does that say about the future of the web if its creator can't even keep a link alive?
I mean, come on, 14 years is nothing! I've got web pages that are still alive from when I put them up over 17 years ago.
01100010 00110001 01101110 00110100 01110010 01111001 00100000 01110011 01110101 01111000 00110000 01110010 01111010
is all i'm sayin'
azure!randals Jun 8 1982, 10:53 pm
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.
... the fist appearance of the signature virus at Oct. 21, 1991 and its first English version at Oct 30, 1991. After all, it's the oldest virus transmitted through Usenet, although it needed the human brain as alternate host, and did no real damage.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
From article:
Oct 1991 Linus Torvalds' Linux announcement
" This is a program for hackers by a hacker."
He confesses! SCO note - He is a hacker! Burn him, hes a witch - burn him!
(Im not a witch, they just stuck a carrot on my nose.. etc..)
"You lied to me! There is a Swansea!"
Scumbags are hijacking Linus' Linux announcement thread to advertise their streaming talk radio programs. Classy.
/. article.
There were no responses to the announcement until this
I'm all for an open usenet but some things are better to be left alone.
This all WAY before the paranoia on IP, and WAY before Linux emerged as anything other than a hobby.
K.
Google's archive is a purty map, but it's missing some details and the map isn't the territory.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
The timeline went up at the same time the Archive did. There was a link to it the initial press release, if I recall. So yes, it IS three years old.
He may have been a lame user but the ORIGINAL BIFF was a dog. BIFF was taught to bark when the mail man came so his owners would know. One the of the developers of sendmail (I think it was sendmail - part of the Berkely email system anyway) - owned BIFF. Someone then put something in the csh to look at your email everytime a command finished executing and then print up "You have new mail" if you had new mail. It was called biffing - from BIFF the dog who barked at the mailman. There was a command in BSD 4.0 called biff - biff -y meant tell me when email arrived. I really have to try to forget some of this suff :-)
andrew
This list was first published in 2001 (1981 + 20 years = 2001). Take a look at this: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/12/11/072721 8&mode=thread
"Until you do what you believe in, how do you know whether you believe in it or not?" -- Leo Tolstoy
Readers of sci.reasearch.careers watched Dr. Fabrikant, an adjucant faculty at Concordia Canada rant and rave about slights by other faculty at the college in 1992. Then they were horrified to read in the general press he killed four of them.
From the earliest days it was hard to tell how serious people were on usenet. Without the the constraint of face-to-face interaction, it was fairly common for people to be far more emotional than in real life. With all the deception on the net, its hard for other readers to tell how serious a poster is.
What, no mention of the day Canter & Siegel bombed Usenet with their drek?
Learn to spell: nickel, missile, lose, solely, amendment, speech, kernel, probably, ridiculous, deity, hierarchy, versus
Reading in the announcement of the first IBM PC here...
The big news might be the software -- there's plenty of it. If you don't like their idea of a diskette OS or Pascal compiler or word processor, you can try USCD Pascal or CPM-86, coming soon from Softech and Digital Research. (Gee, and I
was looking forward to JCL).
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens.
What's up with the link to Bill Clinton:
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=766%40ihuxb.U UCP
It doesn't seem to go to the right place or am I missing something?
I'm a young'n, so I got in to the whole computer show a little late. Usenet always seemed so archaic and intimidating, like an ancient library. Now with this little "Where the Stars Live" map of history, I have no reasonable excuse not to explore!
I'm very sure Google posted this page very long time ago -- I remember seeing it a couple of months after Google acquired Deja. Its not breaking news IMHO.
Does it include the first AOL poster? That was the day Usenet hit the skids.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
so... get some space and make a mirror...... or arent you "someone"?
bah!*@%!
some dude couldn't believe he'd have to wait until 1997 to see all 9 star wars movies. back then I bet they never thought they'd be punished by the Jar Jar
The following Usenet articles were nominated by me to Google (usenet-timeline@google.com):
Introduction of Stupid People's Court
First mention of David Letterman
First mention of Conan O'Brien
Announcement of Conan O'Brien's selection as new host of NBC's Late Night
First mention of Richard Depew's Automatic Retroactive Minimal Moderation (ARMM)
First Draft of ARMM Proposal
Usenet Olympics
the first uuencoded porn ?
I find it remarkable that everyone knew how to form properly punctuated and capitalized sentences back then. Oh how far we've come.
- IP
It's not so much that they are all in one basket as that not many people thought to archive the entire USENET. At the time, hard drive space was at a premium, and clumsy backups to tape were the only alternative. The only reason Deja/Google exists is through some lucky discovery of backup media.
Those who complain about affect & effect on
Eye theenk there spealling adn grammer whirr beter bak wen thay starrted.
Seriously, the timeline seems to really start to degrade around the early 90s. The quality of the posts, even the flames, was quite good back in the early days. Nowadays, you'd think the people posting were the monkeys Spaff was writing about.
Plant a tree in a developing country.
It's incredibly amazing how much insight the poster of the first "Osama bin Laden" usenet post must have had back in 1993.
Don't forget that when he wrote that post, the World Trade center had already been bombed by Bin Laden, so everyone could read the writing on the wall. He wasn't an unknown up and coming terrorist leader, he had already struck and was already well known.
I can't find any of the posts or newsgroups for my computer science classes back in the late '80s/early '90s...some interesting and useful info there; I remember using the first Mozaic(sic) in the CS Lab - and we used elm and pine to read newsgroups and mail to read email via command line. Those were the days.
One thing that is interesting if you search the archive is that the amount of spam just grows and grows until usenet is useless - and less general purpose as it was back in the day - becoming handfuls of islands of special interest in a sea of spam. I stopped using it, opting instead for special interest bulletin boards - such as slashdot).
In the early days it was a great communications medium for groups of people; from an archival standpoint it has limited usefulness as it stands (until someone takes the raw data and does a thorough job of indexing it - which given the size of the archive probably won't happen except for small pieces - like this timeline).
What does the future hold? More message boards, or something more intriguing?
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
"The graph in Figure 1 illustrates the information death of the newsgroups as evaluated using Equation 4. It covers the interval from the first time when the average SNR for the newsgroups reached zero until the last time it left the positive signal zone. The death of the newsgroups is usually assigned to the second date, in spite of the continued existence of pockets of actual information until early in 2007. In Table 3, we have some of the related demographic information about the Internet user population during this period...."
They might even include a footnote about the actual shutdown of the last NNTP server. I wonder what the last post will be? However, I'm already certain it will be posted by a troll.
The big question is actually not when, but what to wear to the funeral. Traditional dark suit and black tie seems too cliche, so I'm leaning towards dressing as a circus clown. (This is actually mostly from a post I wrote in alt.config a few weeks ago.)
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
It was by no means luck. A bunch of us knew about Henry's tapes and made sure then ended up somewhere usefull. SDSU and UWO got them from 9 track to DAT. I got Brewster Kahle to put them online and told Deja to grab them. It took 2 years but they did but never made them available in any sane format; Google did that.
For all the complaints about google keep in mind: where else can you find an article addressable archive of all of useent?
(Well, most of it, bits and pieces are not there, Henry's tapes were filty and large parts were unreadable)
Need Mercedes parts ?
like Bill Gates dropping out of Harvard. Probably a few relatives were dismayed at his lack of perseverance.
I think these counter-examples are noteworthy not because college ruins future success (I think the evidence is largely the other way), but because a lot of people who don't complete college need some reason for believing that they, too, can be successful. And they can - it's just these people are like lottery winners. They're exceptions to the trend.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Andy Tanenbaum is THE Andrew S Tanenbaum?
We study his texts books for Computer Networks like a Bible!!!
Microsoft needs Wizards
Wow, if only I hadn't been 9, and if only I had access to a nntp and uucp.
-Malakai
A Dragon Lives in my Garage
I am smarter than meat. They would never pull my plu
Why is there no earliest mention of Al Qaeda? Can it really be true it didn't exist until early 2001 when Bush took office as the rumors on the Internet claim?
Are they on drugs, it was around since the mid 1800's.
heh some real classics...
Get your torrents...
And not a word about the Church of Joe!
They have archived a conversation from the day the plane struck. Some asshole interjected this message. Whats strange is his email address.
awu...@gmail.com Dec 20 2004, 8:39 pm hide options
Newsgroups: atl.arno
From: awu...@gmail.com - Find messages by this author
Date: 20 Dec 2004 20:39:11 -0800
Local: Mon, Dec 20 2004 8:39 pm
Subject: Re: Check CNN
Reply | Reply to Author | Forward | Print | Individual Message | Show original | Report Abuse
you guys have no idea whats going to happen
The post labled as the First Mention of a Compact Disc is in error. The "Disc's" the user is referring to are actually vinyl discs. He's pointing out that analog media exhibit the same shrinking resolution at lower levels as do digital and that the noise floor in analog media is more intrusive. Digital tape -- and hence likely the A/D and D/A's the post is discussing -- has been in use in professional recording studios for a long time -- the 70's. The CD was not introduced until 1985. To keep the 'record' straight. For real digital heads: All television -- good old analog NTSC -- going back a long time has gone through a digital signal processor as a part of broadcast conformance. And most people (being on a PC right now) will gather, the earliest digital technologies go back decades before the 70's and 80's and "the CD". ~This might pose fun research for the interested. Peace, Steev.
I'm not sure if I agree. It would seem that
only 25% of the US population have at least a bachelor's degree. And (to be US-centric -- apologies about that, but I don't know statistics for other countries) it would be reasonable to assume that "some" percentage of them aren't doing well for whatever reason. So then I guess the rest boils down to how does one define "success" (and what percent of people in the US have attained it? And does it correlate at all w/ the higher-ed-grad figures?) Which would be a longer discussion for another time. But my reason for posting was to mention the numbers -- until recently, I really had had no idea that only a quarter of the population held a degree at all. So I sort of wonder how many people who're successful (however it's defined) are telling tales about their qualifications (which isn't even to mention the tales job seekers tell).
Anyway, in response to your listed requirements for a cellphone, I wanted to let you know of these resources which have helped me quite a bit:
- cellphone feature search
- cellphone comparison
The feature search doesn't have a way to specify your first criteria ("simple phone interface"), but it does show pictures of all the phones it returns. In response to your other criteria (SMS, bluetooth, flip phone, pc sync) the feature search returns 15 phones:Personally I've got my eye on the Nokia 6255, though it doesn't seem to be quite out yet and I want to see if Verizon cripples its bluetooth stack the way they did with the v710.Anyway, hope this helps.
So, it is now 2005. Linux has been ported to so many devices it is almost absurd. Doing what got the "F" turned out to be the right thing in terms of project accessibility, use, growth, and so on not to mention portability. No Minix machines are in the supercmoputer list but Linux is.
So, what should the "final exam" and resulting grade be?
[insert jovial sarcasm tag here]
My Suburban burns less gasoline than your Prius.