Usenet With a 30 Year Lag 102
joey writes "The early A-News days of Usenet are being played out on olduse.net in realtime with a 30 year time delay. You can catch up on what rms and Postel are doing, Keep informed of the latest prices in disk drives ($75000 per gigabyte), and more. Available through a web-based teletype or NNTP. I plan to run the service for the next ten years, until 1991."
Re:September '92 (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually it was 199*3* when AOL added Usenet to its service, and thus began the never-ending influx of newbies.
I started posting on Usenet back in 1988 using local BBS feeds. The SYSop would download the messages at midnight, and his users would reply to the posts, and then wait a full day to see the answer.
Jeez, I get annoyed when the mobile connection on my smartphone doesn't work for 15 minutes. That really makes you appreciate how hyper-connected we are now.
$75000 per gigabyte (Score:3, Insightful)
Seriously, how many people were buying storage by the GIGAbyte back then? The first time I ever heard of a "hard disk drive" was around 1984 (give or take) and it was a 10MB drive that cost about $3k. A friend told me about it, and said it was wicked fast. When I asked him "how fast," he expressed it in terms of the load time for PC-Write [wikipedia.org].
HIM: "You know how, when you load PC-Write, it takes about 10 or 15 seconds to read it off the floppy disk? Well, when you have this 'hard disk' thing, you type pcwrite, hit ENTER, and the hard disk goes 'zzzzt' and then the PC-Write screen pops up all at once."
ME: "Whoa.... Cool!!"
Now we buy terabytes for the cost of a few-dozen floppies in that time. At least we're doing something well.