My Farewell to Usenet
 

I cancelled my account with my usenet provider today.

The newsgroups that I follow have become but shadows of their former selves and, frankly, I was no longer getting value from my subscription.

I've been avoiding this for months. I have followed newsgroups for a quarter century or more, first via AOL when it had a newsgroup feed (back then I followed alt.folklore.urban and rec.boats, as I had a boat at the time, among others--and if you never got flamed on AFU, you have never been flamed) and later through a commercial provider that gave me excellent service for at least two decades.

Heck, when I first started using Linux, comp.os.slackware (I think that was the name of the group) was, along with LQ, one of my primary sources of support and learning. They were as friendly and welcoming as LQ's Slackware forum.

Today's Usenet is but a hollow shell of what used to be and I am saddened.

Wow! You held out there.

I gave up usenet probably when the millennia changed.

I agree, it turned into nothing good after a while.

Well, many of the newsgroups I followed were viable up until late last year.

Then they decayed rapidly, descending into a maelstrom of spam and malware.

Darned shame.

As someone who wasn't into computers & internet back then - how does this work if I may ask?
Was it a sort of walled garden (payed) with subforums etc.?
Did it employ its own network protocols, so you actually had to connect to usenet like you connect to the internet?
And how is it nowadays? I can see alt.folklore.urban on google groups, and the topics are new.

ondoho, it was from a different era. In some ways it was more like HAM radio than anything else.

Usenet predates the Internet but runs over TCP/IP since forever. It is a federated network of hierarchical message systems. From the user perspective it was client-server. On your end you had a threaded news reader which connected to the server(s) which collected the news feeds, that part was client-sever. At the server level it was peer to peer, with the servers communicating with each other as they could. More on that later. Communication was asynchronous and there could be considerable propagation delay so if you were conversing with a distant part of the net you could sometimes see answers hours or days before the original post.

Some feeds were public, some where not. Clarinet, for example, was subscription only. It was the world's first online-only business and provided the same AP, UPI, Reuters, etc, wirefeeds that the major papers got, at more or less the same time they got them, meaning you saw the news up to a day before it was in print.

ISPs used to advertise Usenet access. Not any more.

Usenet was off the radar of the governments for a long time. They caught up with it many years ago and I suspect that is why it became suddenly filled with spam and other noise so as to destroy it completely. The reason for that was that it was uncensorable. All it took was for one researcher to smuggle floppy disk over the border and the messages got through. Thus we were able to follow the collapse of dictatorships and other events like the massacre at Tiananmen Square with more timeliness than the major newspapers, which back then had dedicated foreign correspondents. The final drop was when the multinationals set their sights on it.

The peer to peer nature of Usenet not only made it uncensorable but also enabled reach into areas without much or any Internet at all. There were examples where vehicles, such as mobile clinics, were equiped with Usenet servers and an early form of wireless so that Usenet servers (or clients) in remote villages could get a daily or weekly exchange of messages and feeds. Or as mentioned, sneakernet worked almost just as well.

Contentwise, it was arranged in hierachies by subject, such as sci.agriculture.beekeeping or comp.os.vms or alt.sex.hamsters.ducttape or many others.

Further reading: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/118

Edit: PS some groups were moderated by an individual or a team, such as comp.lang.c.moderated

Thanks, TC.
Sounds - adventurous.

So was the usenet considered to be part of the internet back then?
Or was it more like "there's usenet, and there's internet"?

And how come I can see some content on google groups?

Google has some Usenet content because it went out if its way to buy it. Though the early days of Usenet are mostly lost, some of the later days, subjectively speaking, were archived by DejaNews which was eventually bought up by Google and used to bootstrap their then brand new Google Groups. Someone else probably knows the details but Google has maintained a bridge between Google Groups and Usenet so that messages went both ways.

A major event from the 1990s was "The September That Never Ended" which was when the ISPs started not just including Usenet access but using it as a selling point. That caused the annual, temporary unruliness which came with each autumns influx of fresh university students to become permanent as hoards of people came online without any introduction, guidance, or supervision. Jokes about the ubiquity of AOL floppies can still be found they were everywhere. Plug one in and you get shown Usenet right away. The disks also included WWW access but after a minute or two, you left AOL's very small walled garden, it was no Prodigy or CompuServe, and ended up on the WWW proper. That too caused problems. I wish I had a screen shot from an eary project which had in big H1 elements at the top of their main page something to the effect of "This is not AOL. You have reached the WWW. Please behave."

It was always a formal part of the internet; a good amount of effort went into explaining that "internet" is a superset of "world wide web".

I actually used it for work (yes, really!), mainly sci.spectroscopy (or alt.sci.spectroscopy? I should have kept notes) and others I can't remember, but some time was also spent on aus.comp.linux, aus.cars and others (on these I remember the flamethrowers working overtime on users thinking aus. stood for Austin, USA).

Slurping everything up as always, but yes, that explains it.
It still is!
Nowadays a good amount of effort goes into explaining that the googleverse is not the www...

Anyhow, thanks for the explanations & anecdotal knowledge.

Now that I recall, Yahoo had a bunch of "groups", they were similar to usenet, but I have no idea if they actually were linked to the real usenet.

In fact that was my last sort of foray into the subject was because Beagle board support used Yahoo groups and had them named like comp.beagle.... or something similar.

Problem was, I recall searching, seeing nothing to aid my problem, so I asked a question.

Saw no replies, then realized that the groups were largely unused and last posts to them had been months or years prior.

But because I participated once, every six months to a year or so I'd receive an email about a post. Looked once and the post was the admin saying that the groups overall would be going away soon.

I totally agree, that they were informative in their day, but they eventually just had no activity in most groups. The search for new groups could become tedious.

It is the passing of a whole chunk of information. I'm sure people will have archives in various places.

It was certainly historic — Linus announced his new OS on Usenet! Personally, I've never used it, so it's a bit of a mystery. Wikipedia has a quote from back in 1992:

Wow. Back in the day I spent so much time on comp.lang.perl and other groups that were specialized enough not to get overrun.

Does anyone remember John Baez' Crackpot Index for rating posts on sci.physics? Occasionally it would lead to some hilarious exchanges.

To those asking what Usenet was like: Ender's Game and A Fire Upon The Deep both have good, only-slightly-fictionalized representations.

I don't remember that one, but there were a couple of long time posts that got passed around a lot. I forget pretty much all of them, but your post here reminded me that, much like sticky threads, there were classical posts. Some very good technical guides, and some great collections of jokes.

You all make me feel old.

Which I am, but I try to ignore it.

Usenet was the throbbing heart of the internet before HTML and the world wide web came about.

It is roughly similar to IRC, in that "Newsgroups" were formed around various topics, sort of the forums of their time, and, like forums, some newsgroups were unruly and some were--er--ruly. As with forums, each newsgroup had its own ethos and flavor.

At the time (we're talking late 1980s and early 1990s here when I got my first home computer, a Tandy 386 which served me well for many years--I always got my money's worth from Radio Shack and miss them still--most persons did not have internet access even if they had computers with modems (screech, whine, connect). One of my friends at the time was an educator who had internet access through a local university, but most persons who had computer access were using bulletin boards and associated "conferences" (think Fidonet) or services such as Compuserve or Prodigy for communication to the Big Wide World.

Heck, I ran a PCBoard BBS on OS2/Warp for my employer at the time. I didn't know what I was doing, but I still got it to work.

You young whippersnappers can do a web search for any of the terms above if you want to learn what they mean.

Now I have to go put Mineral Ice on my aging knees. Grump, grump, grump.