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Usenet was the throbbing heart of the internet before HTML and the world wide web came about.
Yep. That was Usenet in a nutshell. It is hard to express how central it was to both professional communication and technical education. It more or less alone occupied the roles that today are filled incompletely today by mailing lists, Web forums, and social control media.
(It seems weird to use past tense.)
I looked at an old configuration file I have archived from one news reader. That one only spans about 15 years and from it I see when I more or less stopped. I held on longest for some hobbies. However, in the beginning I started out using Usenet for work. Later for both work and school. Some courses used in-house news groups for communication. Mail wasn't practical back then, pre-Pine or pre-Eudora the UI was bad and, of course, mail was not ubiquitous then like Usenet. Like many other high tech work places, my work place had non-syndicated groups for in-house communication as well as mostly making use of the public groups.
Didn't the first major worm get distributed via usenet? It was certainly a UNIX worm, and afterwards the man who created it apologised and said he had never intended it to get so out of hand.
The last time I checked, a few years ago, my ISP still provided Usenet access but had changed access to require a user/password. It had been a few years and my usual haunts were as you experienced, so I've not checked since.
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.
I had the Trash 80.
Used to work in modems, in fact worked with the team that designed Trellis coded modulation. Most of us could, and did, whistle a V.22 BIS answerback tone to put modems into training. You'd think we did it for fun, but no, it was actual testing.
Fidonet ... THERE'S a word I haven't heard since the 80's!
We used to use internal newsgroups in university (only the computer science dept) - they were pretty useful in that setting. However surely the biggest use historically was with newzbin? Lightening fast transfers of binaries (games, movies etc) with parity files for recovery. Not sure whether they are still used in this manner these days however 10/15 years ago these were the things to make p2p sharers cry into their bedsheets ����.
We used to use internal newsgroups in university (only the computer science dept) - they were pretty useful in that setting. However surely the biggest use historically was with newzbin? Lightening fast transfers of binaries (games, movies etc) with parity files for recovery. Not sure whether they are still used in this manner these days however 10/15 years ago these were the things to make p2p sharers cry into their bedsheets ����.
It is where the vast majority of the files come from on all the torrent sites. Basically anything that airs on TV these days is uploaded to the servers. At least for english programs from North America, the english speaking world really. Foreign languages I have no clue but there is more than enough of them too. Many a time I have downloaded a file marked as a foreign language file to discover at least an english audio track in addition to the language labeled on it.
Around two decades ago, most pirated releases would be distributed first on IRC, because that's where the pirating groups were actually organized. Not Usenet.
Every year my subscription to individual.net comes up and I have the same though: Will I or won't I? I am committed to another year at the moment but after careful consideration I now only follow the following:
And even these are swamped by trolls from time to time. It is indeed sad to see Usenet in the current day. I have a soft spot for nsr where in the old days the slrn mafia would congregate .
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.
I'm betting I can make you feel younger OS/2 Warp? Shoot! my first OpSys purchase after PCDOS (MSDOS 3 was a gift) was OS/2 2.1. It's hard looking back to realize previous to those I had zero hard drives. Everything, in some cases even BIOS extensions, were all on big floppies.
OS/2 2.1 was a huge leap for me from which I did BBS, Mosaic and Gopher once I upgraded to a 386 and a crap 2400 baud modem. I didn't do Usenet until Warp 3 but I don't see it as very similar to BBS or IRC since those are realtime but Usenet was more like public community email, having persistence, but where you might wait days for a response. It was the wild, wild West even if you didn't search alt.binaries
My first ISP was IBM quickly followed by CompuServe but later even AOL had a default Usenet app. It's actually a bit surprising to me that Slackware still ships Pan, even though for a time it was a really good Usenet app. In fact, Pan was a major turning point for me because I stopped using Win95 altogether and rarely rebooted anymore just to use some 3rd Party Usenet app I thought I couldn't live without and I can't now even recall it's name, just some vague image of an avatar icon that reminded me of the Mad Magazine Spy vs/ Spy cartoon guy.
Ah, Usenet... those were the days! Up until a few years ago I was a member at Eternal September, the name of which is significant to Usenet. Going back to about 1991, I was a member of The WELL; there were some great newsgroups there. The internet back then, prior to the World Wide Web, was a magical and wonderful place to me, full of useful information. It still is, of course, but the signal-to-noise ratio seems different, these days. Nowadays, the WWW just seems like a big shopping mall.
Yes, I too miss Radio Shack. In into one of their stores several times a week, in the day. Own a Color Computer "CoCo". I would browse their aisles seeing if there is something I needed for a project.
PCBoard BBS! LOL I might have been a user on one of your boards.
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