Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit From: D Subject: Fw: Usenet Newsgroups Part III - Founding, Fame, Influence, and Foreshadowing Message-Id: <20240824.124513.0781163a@mixmin.net> Date: Sat, 24 Aug 2024 12:45:13 +0100 References: <20240822.233322.79fa09ba@mixmin.net> Newsgroups: comp.misc Path: ...!news.misty.com!2.eu.feeder.erje.net!feeder.erje.net!news2.arglkargh.de!alphared!sewer!news.dizum.net!not-for-mail Organization: dizum.com - The Internet Problem Provider X-Abuse: abuse@dizum.com Injection-Info: sewer.dizum.com - 2001::1/128 Bytes: 8534 Lines: 124 On Sat, 24 Aug 2024 08:15:07 -0000 (UTC), Bozo User wrote: >On 2024-08-22, D wrote: >> On Thu, 22 Aug 2024 20:28:55 -0000 (UTC), Bozo User wrote: >> snip >>>> "Table of Contents: >>>> https://tagn.wordpress.com/2023/12/10/usenet-newsgroups-part-iii-founding-fame-influence-and-foreshadowing/ >>>You can read these under slrn. >> >> only skim read some of this, but tor browser works just fine . . . >> (using Tor Browser 13.5.2) >>>https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/blog/2019-11/2019-11-14.html >>>The Early History of Usenet, Part I: Prologue >>>https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/blog/2019-11/2019-11-14a.html >>>The Early History of Usenet, Part II: The Technological Setting >>>https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/blog/2019-11/2019-11-15.html >>>The Early History of Usenet, Part III: Hardware and Economics >>>https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/blog/2019-11/2019-11-17.html >>>The Early History of Usenet, Part IV: File Format >>>https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/blog/2019-11/2019-11-21.html >>>The Early History of Usenet, Part V: Implementation and User Experience >>>https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/blog/2019-11/2019-11-22.html >>>The Early History of Usenet, Part VI: Authentication and Norms >> https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/blog/2019-11/2019-11-25.html >>>The Early History of Usenet, Part VII: The Public Announcement >>>https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/blog/2019-11/2019-11-30.html >>>The Early History of Usenet, Part VIII: Usenet Growth and B-news >>>https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/blog/2019-12/2019-12-26.html >>>The Early History of Usenet, Part IX: The Great Renaming >>>https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/blog/2020-01/2020-01-09.html >>>The Early History of Usenet, Part X: Retrospective Thoughts >>>https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/blog/2020-01/2020-01-09a.html >>>The Early History of Usenet, Part XI: Errata >>>https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/blog/control/tag_index.html#TH_Usenet_history >>>The tag URL ...#TH_Usenet_history will always take you to an index of all >>>blog posts on this topic. >>[end quoted excerpts] > >Nah, I meant the whole Usenet spool inside slrn, as if you were >reading a modern spool one, with threads and such. Very >convenient unlike opening every post by hand with a text editor. it's a very interesting historical account . . . here's a sample: (using Tor Browser 13.5.2) https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/blog/2019-11/2019-11-14a.html >The Early History of Usenet, Part II: The Technological Setting >14 November 2019 >Usenet--Netnews--was conceived almost exactly 40 years ago this month. >To understand where it came from and why certain decisions were made >the way they were, it's important to understand the technological >constraints of the time. >Metanote: this is a personal history as I remember it. None of us were >taking notes at the time; it's entirely possible that errors have crept >in, especially since my brain cells do not even have parity checking, >let alone ECC. Please send any corrections. >In 1979, mainframes still walked the earth. In fact, they were the >dominant form of computing. The IBM PC was about two years in the >future; the microcomputers of the time, as they were known, had too >little capability for more or less anything serious. For some purposes, >especially in research labs and process control systems, so-called >minicomputers--which were small, only the size of one or two full-size >refrigerators--were used. So-called "super-minis", which had the raw >CPU power of a mainframe though not the I/O bandwidth, were starting >to become available. >At the time, Unix ran on a popular line of minicomputers, the Digital >Equipment Corporation (DEC) PDP-11. The PDP-11 had a 16-bit address >space (though with the right OS, you could quasi-double that by using >one 16-bit address space for instructions and a separate one for data); >depending on the model, memory was limited to the 10s of kilobytes >(yes, kilobytes) to a very few megabytes. No one program could access >more than 64K at a time, but the extra physical memory meant that a >context switch could often be done without swapping, since other >processes might still be memory-resident. (Note well: I said "swapping", >not "paging"; the Unix of the time did not implement paging. There was >too little memory per process to make it worthwhile; it was easier to >just write the whole thing out to disk...) >For most people, networking was non-existent. The ARPANET existed (and >I had used it by then), but to be on it you had be a defense contractor >or a university with a research contract from DARPA. IBM had assorted >forms of networking based on leased synchronous communications lines >(plus some older mechanisms for dial-up batch remote job entry), and >there was at least one public packet-switched network, but very, very >few places had connections to it. The only thing that was halfway >common was the dial-up modem, which ran at 300 bps. The Bell 212A full- >duplex, dial-up modem had just been introduced but it was rare. Why? >Because you more or less had to lease it from the phone company: Ma >Bell, more formally known as AT&T. It was technically legal to buy your >own modems, but to hardwire them to the phone network required going >through a leased adapter known as a DAA (data access arrangement) to >"protect the phone network". (Explaining that would take a far deeper >dive into telephony regulation than I have the energy for tonight.) >Usenet originated in a slightly different regulatory environment, >though: Duke University was served by Duke Telecom, a university entity >(and Durham was GTE territory), while UNC Chapel Hill, where I was a >student, was served by Chapel Hill Telephone-the university owned the >phone, power, water, and sewer systems, though around this time the >state legislature ordered that the utilities be divested. >There was one more piece to the puzzle: the computing environments at >UNC and Duke computer science. Duke had a PDP-11/70, then the high-end >model, running Unix. We had a PDP-11/45 intended as a dedicated machine >for molecular graphics modeling; it ran DOS, a minor DEC operating >system. It had a few extra terminal ports, but these didn't even have >modem control lines, i.e., the ports couldn't tell if the line had >dropped. We hooked these to the university computer center's Gandalf >port selector. With assistance from Duke, I and a few others brought up >6th Edition Unix on our PDP-11, as a part-time OS. Some of the faculty >were interested enough that they scrounged enough money to buy a better >8-port terminal adapter and some more RAM (which might have been core >storage, though around that time semiconductor RAM was starting to >become affordable). We got a pair of VAX-11/780s soon afterwards, but >Usenet originated on this small, slow 11/45. >The immediate impetus for Usenet was the desire to upgrade to 7th >Edition Unix. On 6th Edition Unix, Duke had used a modification they >got from elsewhere to provide an announcement facility to send messages >to users when they logged in. It wasn't desirable to always send such >messages; at 300 bps--30 characters a second--a five-line message took >annoying long to print (and yes, I do mean "print" and not "display"; >hardcopy terminals were still very, very common). This modification was >not even vaguely compatible with the login command on 7th Edition; a >completely new implementation was necessary. And 7th Edition had uucp >(Unix-to-Unix Copy), a dial-up networking facility. This set the stage >for Usenet. >To be continued... [end quote plain text]