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looking back at Usenet
Steven Bellovin, one of the creators of Usenet 40 years ago, has written a retrospective and history of the project. I've actually had this open in a tab for a while; when I first came across it about half the articles had been posted and there were placeholders for the rest. He's now finished it.
This is a mix of technical and political history. At the time I was using it (I gained access around 1983, I think), I didn't know any of the background; to me as a student, ARPANet and Usenet were just two different networks that moved stuff around. (My experience of ARPANet at the time was limited to mailing lists.) I knew that Usenet was decentralized (unlike ARPANet, a government network), but I didn't at the time know the extent to which it was put together by a scrappy band of grad students with limited resources and an attitude of "it's easier to ask forgiveness than get permission". Or so it seems to me in reading this series of posts, anyway.
I learned a lot about the behavior of networked communities on Usenet. I made lots of mistakes, of course; I mean, not only was it a new concept to me, but I was an undergrad without a lot of broad, cultural experience outside my own. And even though I was a bumbling student learning the ropes, I could participate alongside everyone else there -- what you wrote and how well you communicated mattered a lot more than who you were. I -- a lowly undergrad and relative newcomer -- was taken seriously by the architects in planning the Great Renaming. Later the New Yorker would publish that famous cartoon about how on the Internet nobody knows you're a dog; even before that, I had already learned that on Usenet nobody knows (or cares) that you're an undergrad, or insert-demographic-here, or whatever. In retrospect, this might have been somewhat formative for me online.
Technologies change and communities change. Spammers got more aggressive, some of the communities I participated on either scattered or moved elsewhere, and the web emerged as a new way of interacting online. I preferred mailing lists to web forums (because email is push and web sites are pull; this was before syndication was a thing), and then I discovered blogs and LiveJournal. I gradually drifted away from Usenet. And over time I drifted away from some of those other things in favor of yet other things; online communities aren't done evolving by a longshot. (And then there's social media, which feels...different from intentional communities to me. Less cohesive, more episodic and sound-bite-ish.) I imagine that looking back to today in 40 more years will seem just as foreign and quaint as looking back to the beginnings of Usenet must seem to those who weren't around at the time.
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It pains my heart how much of the article is defensive "please don't second-guess our design decisions of 40 years ago". We as a programming community can be so harshly judgmental.
Also, I do recall "dialing" a phone using the hangup button/switch. Wonder if it was something we kids figured out on our own or if my dad mentioned it worked..
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(Probably not going to start following it again now, but I'm curious enough to look in. My focus right now is on building Codidact and the communities we will host.)
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The "read news" command showed me a list of available newsgroups, including among others sci.logic and alt.sca (which became rec.org.sca a few years later, as I'm sure you remember). Ironically, sci.logic had a higher proportion of trolls than rec.org.sca. And I spent way too much time in grad school (1986-1992) reading and writing on various newsgroups. At one point I swore off most of them in the interest of finishing my dissertation, coming back to rec.org.sca briefly during the Great SCA Pay-To-Play Brouhaha (1994?). And I, too, was favorably flabbergasted that it didn't matter how old your were or what alphabet soup (SCA or modern) you had; what mattered was the content of your writing.
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Correct -- IIRC, it started the evening of Birka '94.
(I believe I was partly responsible for starting the firestorm. Hell of a day, if I remember the sequence right: Caitlin got her Pelican, we got home to a phone message from our apprentices in CA saying what the Board had just done, I posted to the Rialto and *kaboom*, the world exploded and everything started to move remarkably fast...)
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The final chapter is especially interesting: I sometimes ponder the idea of booting up a new version of Usenet, adapted to modern technology and requirements (I even registered nusenet.org for it a couple of years ago). Good to see that his thoughts on what that might mean roughly align with mine. (Not identical by any means, but at least directionally similar.) One of these years...
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I started usenet a bit later than y'all ('88? '89? After the renaming, but early enough that the concept of "september all year" made sense to me). I remember a very wise friend saying to me that 3 things on the VAX could suck all your time, if you let them: Netnews, MUDs, and, um, IRC? I started with Netnews (usenet), and never got onto the others. I mostly lurked at that point (except for an alt group which, due to being dropped by an upstream host, never left my campus (unless cross-posted)); later, however, I did post a little bit. Enough that, years later, I discovered that someone had warlorded my .sig. (I don't recall my .sig as being that bad; I think they mostly objected to my having a version number in it.)
I haven't looked at it in ages, though.
Trolls
(Anonymous) 2020-01-15 03:01 pm (UTC)(link)no subject
I poked around in the spool, using "more" to read posts, and concluded that this was interesting stuff. So I wrote an Emacs package, as one does, to read whatever group(s) you specified. Two panes -- message list in one, body in the other, keyboard navigation in the former to move around. Mine was very primitive, so when I found out about somebody else's package that was nicer, I switched to that.