Re: But is UseNet "Social Media"??

Mr. Man-wai Chang <[email protected]> wrote:
> On 2/1/2026 9:33 PM, Frank Slootweg wrote:
> 
> > "Usenet, conceived by Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis in 1979 at the
> >   University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Duke University, was
> >   the first open social media app, established in 1980."
> > 
> >    So I guess that settles it once and for all! :-)
> 
> "social media app"? Usenet was an "app"? I think it's a mistake. :)

  I normally also object to back-dating the use of the term 'app' by
several decades, but if you substitute 'app' by 'program' (or
'application', etc.), then for all intents and purposes, for the user,
Usenet *was* a program, which read/posted articles from/to the *local*
'spool'. A client program, reading/posting directly from/to a remote
news server came only much later. Remember, NetNews/Usenet *predates*
the Internet by quite a number of years. 

  FWIW, I already used/managed a NetNews/Usenet system in the early 80s.
Used RFA (Remote File Access) before NFS (Network File System) even
existed and UUCP (Unix-to-Unix Copy) to receive/send articles from/to
other systems. And yes, the user used a *program* (called 'notes' [1])!

[1] <http://tin.org/history.html>