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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 wish time was this recursive.
...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...
I can't stop RTFA
It's inconvenient to read TFA when the link provided is for "http://slashdot.org/olduse.net".
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
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
Great - Updated from "http://slashdot.org/olduse.net" to "http://tech.slashdot.org/story/11/06/06/1435259/olduse.net". Much better...
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
Yup, just like the good ole days.
This is one time where TL;DR is really apropos.
Have gnu, will travel.
Great - Updated from "http://slashdot.org/olduse.net" to "http://tech.slashdot.org/story/11/06/06/1435259/olduse.net". Much better...
The broken link is half of the 30-year-lag experience.
.. 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
This is old news.
It's inconvenient to read TFA when the link provided is for "http://slashdot.org/olduse.net".
It should have been "news:alt.misc.slashdot"
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
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.
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!
Check back in 30 years and it will link to the real article.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
You're not 'supposed' to care, jackass.
Not interested? Don't read it.
news://olduse.net works in Mozilla SeaMonkey (probably works in thunderbird too, or netscape, or opera)
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
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.
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.
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
There's no alt.* yet at all, in 1981, but this was just posted "today" to fa.info-cpm:
Keith Petersen (W8SDZ@MC) has uploaded the following files for those :LMODEM on MC to get MC:CPM;CRCK COM and
of you with the APPLE II with the Microsoft Z80 cards and CP/M. We
suggest that you capture MC:CPM;APBOOT MAC (or MC:CPM;APMBOT ASM),
assemble it, and use it with
the MC:CPM;APMODM 21ASM or MC:CPM;APMODM 2ASM. Assemble either APMODM
and you can throw away APBOOT. From there you can use APMODM to grab
whatever other files of interest from MC:CPM; or the various Remote
CP/M systems around the country (see MC:CPM;RCP/M NOS and MC:CPM;RCP/M
INFO for more details).
MC:CPM;
1 APBOOT MAC 0 +235
1 APBYE ASM 4 +764
1 APHIGH MEMASM 0 +310
14 APMBOT ASM 1 +500
1 APMODM 21ASM 7 +550
1 APMODM 2ASM 7 +832
1 APMODM DOC 0 +908
1 APXMOD ASM 4 +848
see shy jo
BIFF.
CLASS OF 93
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
I know the feeling. I used to hang out on soc.singles (and before that, net.singles, before the Great Renaming).
I still read my email on my ISP's shell server, with Pine, still use trn.
I get the usual "Oh, is that DOS?" comments when people look over my shoulder. :-)
I feel old too, but it's a proud feeling old.
I was there in the formative years of NetNews/USEnet (I was duke!ggw) and miss the real early postings.
This is apparently starting in 1981, while I was off-net for a while.
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.
Perhaps even 30-minute lag would turn out to be too optimistic.