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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."
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first post! I probably failed it
Monstar L
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.
"You feel like you've been here before." --More--
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..
It's not worth a cracker 'cause it doesn't have my first Usenet post, back in December '87.
20-year Usenet Archive and 20-year Usenet Timeline are different things.
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.
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
Granted, they seem to be doing bad things with it (the groups-beta thing really kinda bites), but I don't see them ditching it -- it fits in very well with their key business (searching), and I doubt it costs them much money (compared to their web search, for example) to keep going.
And it's useful -- when looking for answers to technical issues (like `I got *this* error. How do I fix it?', searching Usenet is often more useful than the web.
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 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?
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.
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.
I'm basing that on several factors. Checking the Alexa rankings over the past few months, Google Groups have gone from about 7% of all Google users down to 1% as of a few moments ago. Granted, Alexa is not the most accurate measurement of a site, but it does give some indications as to overall popularity.
Some of their own statistics show that most groups have low activity: Group-Society Activity High (167) Low (6712) Medium (137)
All of the other groups show low activity as the largest numbers. They simply do not have the eyeballs hitting the groups.
They do not show Adsense ads in groups, at least none that I've found. It's all paid for by ad revenue from other Google areas.
The groups that are not moderated have degenerated into ad spam fests, driving off people interested in those groups topics.
I think that when Alexa shows less than 1% of users, Google will decide it's no longer worth keeping.
I do agree with you that Usenet can be useful for finding answers, I use a combination of Google search and Groups search. I still think Google will rethink Groups, either dumping it, or correcting the problems. (I'm leaning toward them dumping it).
Pete Carr Owner Chatmag.com
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
Except that Google Posts a link to the timeline on the usenet back in 2001. It's old news. Nothing to see here, move along.. support.general/msg/d88f36fb3e2c0aac
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/google.public
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).
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
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
"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."
The posts are about aircraft, so are the ads. You don't think there are clerks manually selecting the ads for every search you do, do you?
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
This is probably going to come as a shock to you so sit down and brace yourself:
Google does not control Usenet.
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.
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
$400?!? Holy crap
Send/track messages to 100K people: www.xPressAlert.com
...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
No, but they could avoid putting a reply button by any post older than, say, a year. "Normal" news servers don't carry old messages, so you can't reply to them except manually, which is a good thing. Google should be the same.
I am trolling
As I said, it wasn't called "Usenet" then. Just a command line "news" running on a BSD system, as I dimly recall. About 5 articles a day. As a lowly 2nd year student at Melbourne Uni, an early adopter of Unix. I didn't have much access time or privileges.
I note that both your and my posts have been modded "flamebait". How perverse.