Re: Usenet Newsgroups Part III - Founding, Fame, Influence, and Foreshadowing

On Sat, 24 Aug 2024 08:15:07 -0000 (UTC), Bozo User <[email protected]> wrote:
>On 2024-08-22, D <[email protected]> wrote:
>> On Thu, 22 Aug 2024 20:28:55 -0000 (UTC), Bozo User <[email protected]> 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]