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

On Sat, 24 Aug 2024 08:15:07 -0000 (UTC), Bozo User <anthk@disroot.org> wrote:

On 2024-08-22, D <noreply@mixmin.net> wrote:

On Thu, 22 Aug 2024 20:28:55 -0000 (UTC), Bozo User <anthk@disroot.org> 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...

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