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Usenet With a 30 Year Lag
joey writes "The early A-News days of Usenet are being played out on olduse.net in realtime with a 30 year time delay. You can catch up on what rms and Postel are doing, Keep informed of the latest prices in disk drives ($75000 per gigabyte), and more. Available through a web-based teletype or NNTP. I plan to run the service for the next ten years, until 1991."
I suppose that's one way to get people to RTFA.
Link in story is broken.
See title for more details.
...you must keep vodka intake at sub-thursday levels.
"If I have been able to see so far, It is because I went out and bought a damn binoculars" - Ze da Esquina
Besides a 30-year reverse time warp we have a recursive link. That's deep. Too deep for a Monday really...
He really should run it until '92, when the Internet became accessible to just about everyone and was no longer a strictly military,academic, and industrial plaything. For historical interest those that were active before that date would be of greatest interest. Stopping in '91seems arbitrary.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
So if you post to it I suppose it changes the discussion, right?
I could probably get a lot of first posts using the timestamps from the current Usenet.
Yup, just like the good ole days.
.. a bit dramatic, don't you think? I wonder what the last topic is going to be. :)
What if you had to tell someone the most important thing in the world, but you knew they'd never believe you?
"If I have been able to see so far, It is because I went out and bought a damn binoculars" - Ze da Esquina
To see once again just how damaging that was to the internet...
This is old news.
I now have a reason to rewrite rn in Perl.
Yours In Detroit,
Kilgore Trout
Instead of the big war he predicted would start in 2004, he was actually was saying it would start in 2034.
However, the world's now supposed to come to an end this coming October, and again in December 2012, so I'm not sure how this fits into the schedule.
I am officially gone from
You have to play out the DePew debacle of early 1993! This generation needs to see the replay of one of the worst software lasers of all time!
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
so... will this have the Commodore 64 releases from back then... or is it just another iteration of the useless usenet?
This is exactly what we get, when services are tried to be run too efficiently. Like utilizing nearly 100% of resources provided by server. If server is down for just a while, it'll take ages to catch up. At least three news servers which I were using had all normal load over 90%. Which meant that if server went down for a day, it took easily one to two weeks to catch up!
As a Usenet user back in the BBS days of yore... this post really makes me feel... really, really, old.
You're not 'supposed' to care, jackass.
Not interested? Don't read it.
30 year lag before seeing your own posts... :-) Now i understand why these html forums have taken over this usenet thingy !
So much for the "hack job".
Yep - there's another woman who got messages from The Peter Tweeter!
I've been thinking for the last decade or two that it would be interesting to do something like this, but on a shorter scale, such as 1-2 years, and using a source for political and world news that's as neutral as possible. That way, we can be reminded of things that are mostly still relevant, yet later got spun away, swept under the rug, or outright discredited. In particular, It'd be less of a novelty and more of a useful tool in refreshing our collective memory. I think it'd be especially useful in two situations:
1) It's easy to say that "X was a bad decision" after the fact, especially since parties are eager to blame the other side and someone always has to take the blame for things that go wrong, but if we see the events as they play out, sometimes those "obvious" bad decisions actually end up being good field decisions that were well-founed based on the information available at the time.
2) When we find out that someone in authority was lying to us over an extended period of time, those sorts of scandals are often downplayed in the media and swept under the rug quickly, meaning that they're forgotten and implicitly excused when we get distracted by something else. But if we re-watch the lies and see them as they played out, we'll be reminded of exactly how long and hard the lie was repeated without the coloration that later spin applied to it.
Imagine the public accountability that something like this could create. Imagine if the memory of the mob didn't last a mere five minutes, but instead lasted for years. Imagine how people's priorities would change when they're shown ephemeral things that they thought were world-shatteringly important at the time, but were really not that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things. Imagine how PR and spin would change if they had the knowledge that it would all be dredged up again later. Imagine how casual political discussion would change if the rose colored glasses were removed in such a manner. Imagine how much more consensus we could reach when we're all reminded of the original facts, rather than the spin and interpretation that happened after.
Ehh...I can dream, but I'm not kidding anyone, even myself. While I'd love to see something like that, there's no way it'd ever see its full potential.
Seriously, how many people were buying storage by the GIGAbyte back then? The first time I ever heard of a "hard disk drive" was around 1984 (give or take) and it was a 10MB drive that cost about $3k. A friend told me about it, and said it was wicked fast. When I asked him "how fast," he expressed it in terms of the load time for PC-Write.
HIM: "You know how, when you load PC-Write, it takes about 10 or 15 seconds to read it off the floppy disk? Well, when you have this 'hard disk' thing, you type pcwrite, hit ENTER, and the hard disk goes 'zzzzt' and then the PC-Write screen pops up all at once."
ME: "Whoa.... Cool!!"
Now we buy terabytes for the cost of a few-dozen floppies in that time. At least we're doing something well.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
This is the only thing that makes me envy the me generation. I was born in 82 and am loving to read about the EUNICE project on VMS from a year before I was born. The 80s sure were epic!
Excellent idea! For implementation, I propose that google add a "newsdate:" keyword... just specify a date, and you get the news (or the entire www, if that's possible) as it appeared on that day. That would be useful in a lot of ways for a lot of things.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
http://www.skrenta.com/rt/utzoo-usenet/ apparently includes a copy of all 141 tapes which comprise the oldest archive of usenet messages.
You're right... it has no cloud! :(
Does it have alt.binaries? My usenet provider costs like 10 bucks a month and only provides 1000 days worth of retention, which means I can't pirate popular software from the 1980's.
This should ameliorate that problem quite well!
If all this was put on a DVD+R (assume double layer, since DL burners are fairly common now), and starting from the very beginning, how many years of Usenet would the single disk be able to store?
Finally get a chance to get all those pr0n fills that nobody would ever repost.
Back in the old days, most people posted on Usenet without the realization that their posts would be sneakily archived for perpetuity. The circle of readers and posters were rather small, and the concern of privacy had not arisen until very later on. As such, most people post in their real names, contrary to the present-day practice of posting pseudonymously when discussing social or political issues.
Then, sometime in the 1990â(TM)s , some company, probably Altavista, made the archive of Usenet available in archive form. Fortunately, it made it possible for me to remove my posts in their archive with relative easy.
It troubles me greatly that olduse.net is being launched without any apparent measures to address privacy concerns. The consequences can potentially be gravely perilous for many people. I strongly suggest its operators take actions to address the privacy issues. Better yet, the issue of privacy should be made so prominent that it informs and guides any and all future old Usenet resurrection enthusiasts.
amazing looking back 30 years and seeing how things were so different... The economy was in the tank, gas prices were through the roof, unrest in the middle east and a nuclear scare... glad we have come so far
Why can't we get a newsfeed from this site via UUCP?
Archives are popping up everywhere. Recently I found this archive of the Fidonet Holysmoke echo. It's amazing to me how much effort people are willing to invest to resurrect things like this.
So, this goes back a few years before my time. It certainly takes me back though. I was working at a company, actually a division of a company, whose system admin had gone to Berkeley. He made damn sure we had a usenet connection to our DEC PDP 11 and later our two Vaxen as they were acquired. These systems ran unix, probably 4.2BSD. They were ridiculously puny compared to even the cheapest low end PC of today. We had no graphics, just a bunch of terminals connected by serial lines to the host computer, pure command line interface.
If the bosses had known how much time we spent at work browsing usenet, I don't think they would have been too happy. Most sites on usenet were universities or research departments. My company was a high tech company; we were developing scientific instruments for use in industrial laboratories. I was what would now be called an embedded systems programmer.
Email was an adventure. You had to figure out a route from one site to another, with links separated by exclamation marks, and sometimes the exclamation mark or 'bang' had to be escaped so the shell wouldn't interpret it as a history designator. You see that in the 'path' lines from the posting headers, (an example plucked at random from a posting at the site: utzoo!duke!unc!smb. 'duke' would be Duke University, and 'unc' the University of North Carolina, google 'utzoo' and see what you find.) An email might take hours to get to its destination!
I actually purchased a copy of the original usenet tape cassette (http://nosuch.com/usenet/tapes/).
What you see now is only what was archived, typically on mag tape. There was no formal organization charged with preserving the archive so it's just what administrators at various sites bothered to keep, and then, years later, what was still readable off the media. When google groups started making the archive available, I remember the discussions about how some of the more off the wall usenet groups were not necessarily preserved and some of the old-timers regretted that they preserved technical stuff but not the socially oriented stuff, which nowadays would provide an interesting window on where peoples' heads were at about things like gay marriage or whatnot.
And the flame wars in those innocent times! Flame wars about tubes versus transistors or analog versus digital in rec.audio for instance with all the colorful imagery of their invective that nerdy college students could muster.
Even reading this site now, using the keystrokes to navigate, my fingers still remember how to do it! Groucho Marx is supposed to have said about the nostalgia for Vaudeville that vaudeville was terrible, what the old timers are nostalgic for is their youth. Maybe that's what I'm nostalgic about when I think of the old usenet, I dunno. But, if you went to a reasonably serious newsgroup and asked a question, you could usually get a pretty good answer without a lot of static. And you didn't have to go through a moderator or sign up to use the site with an id and password. You just asked. And you got a few responses but they were generally good responses because the whole thing was a relatively small community of people who were mostly somewhat on the ball or they wouldn't even know about usenet.
I didn't need to read the prompts, just automatically started navigating and reading by keyboard.
As always, spacebar = MORE
Three Squirrels
Suddenly a bright light has appeared, and I no longer fear the unknown. The past and future shall be rewritten beginning today.
Because a Audio Video hard disk drive wasn't like the others, because it was fast enough to keep-up with the capture rate of your digital media equipment to stream onto the platter, unlike Western Digital and Seagate!
AV drives from Micropolis were around $2k for a 80MB unit, if I remember correctly. They were so well made in USA, they still work today, and they sound warm like a vinyl record player. Things made in USA just work better, but not until it's bought-up by Maxtor.