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Google's 20-Year Usenet Timeline

Posted by timothy on from the immemorial dept.

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."

13 of 412 comments (clear)

  1. Linus by debilo · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

  2. This has been around for a while... by kaden · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Heh, this was reported on Slashdot over ago...

    1. Re:This has been around for a while... by darc · · Score: 5, Funny

      Shh, this is our chance to karma up and reuse the jokes from the old thread! Dammit, now you've gone and spoiled it.

      --
      Tired of legitimate data sources? Try UNCYCLOPEDIA
  3. To Ron at Rutgers: by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Expect a call from Apple Legal. Steve doesn't like having his surprises ruined.

  4. Hurd by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    "Hurd will be out in a year or two" - Linus

    It cracks me up every time.

  5. Justice Must Be Done... by stevens · · Score: 5, Funny

    Someone hunt down and kill that "Me too" guy with AOL CDs.

  6. Re:Alas they didn't get the first by jdunn14 · · Score: 5, Funny

    Me too!!!

  7. A giggle-inducer by shigelojoe · · Score: 5, Funny

    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?

  8. Coming Soon! by Garabito · · Score: 5, Funny
    Slashdot 7 year timeline!

    • First "First post!"
    • First "In Soviet Russia" post
    • First Goatse.cx troll
    • First GNAA troll

    • and,

    • CmdrTaco announcement of the iPod.
  9. This is Bill Gates first post by br00tus · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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)

  10. Anyone catch the www response by drix · · Score: 5, Funny
    Even better is what some smartass posted 12 years later in response to the original www thread:
    Tim,

    I have to say that this "world wide web" thing sounds like a ridiculous concept. I can't imagine it will take off. Next thing you'll tell us is that people can do commerce through the "web" or even browse pornography! I would never invest in it. I am going to put my money in something with real potential, namely a floppy disk that can hold 1.8 megabytes. This should be able to hold all the data you could possibly want to carry around with you, for decades to come.
    --

    I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
  11. First Y2k solution by Cainjustcain · · Score: 5, Funny
    "In 1978, when I was working in banking, I ran across a curious date storage format. It seems that transaction dates were coded with the last digit of the year in one nibble, the month in hex in the next, and the date (in packed decimal) in the next two

    "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."

  12. Re:Map of usenet by agildehaus · · Score: 5, Funny

    Porn
    |
    |----Usenet----Internet----Me
    |
    Warez