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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."
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
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.
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. :)
Well probably. I mean Eternal September didn't start until nearly a year later.
Om, nomnomnom...
This is old news.
Actually it was 199*3* when AOL added Usenet to its service, and thus began the never-ending influx of newbies.
I started posting on Usenet back in 1988 using local BBS feeds. The SYSop would download the messages at midnight, and his users would reply to the posts, and then wait a full day to see the answer.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
Actually it was 199*3* when AOL added Usenet to its service, and thus began the never-ending influx of newbies.
I started posting on Usenet back in 1988 using local BBS feeds. The SYSop would download the messages at midnight, and his users would reply to the posts, and then wait a full day to see the answer.
Jeez, I get annoyed when the mobile connection on my smartphone doesn't work for 15 minutes. That really makes you appreciate how hyper-connected we are now.
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
Yeah, that was when long distance calls were expensive, so BBS owners would try to keep costs down by only connecting to the Usenet at night. Fidonet BBSes operated on the same principle.
Some BBS owners provided real-time access to usenet or fidonet, but they also charged Users for that privilege.
Speeds were slower back then too. 1k or 2 k was standard for the Users, while BBS Owners shared messages across the nation at a "trailblazing" 18 k. Of course it was pure text - no pictures exist on Usenet or Fidonet.
QuantumLink (AOL) was the only service with lo-res graphics.
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
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