2.1 Million of the Oldest Internet Posts Are Now Online For Anyone To Read (vice.com) 106
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Decades before Twitter threads, Reddit forums, or Facebook groups, there was Usenet: an early-internet, pre-Web discussion system where one could start and join conversations much like today's message boards. Launched in 1980, Usenet is the creation of two Duke University students who wanted to communicate between decentralized, local servers -- and it's still active today. On Usenet, people talk about everything, from nanotech science to soap operas, wine, and UFOs. Jozef Jarosciak, a systems architect based in Ontario, had his first encounter with Usenet in 2000, when he found a full-time job in Canada thanks to a job posting there.
This week, Jarosciak uploaded some of the oldest Usenet posts available to the internet. Around 2.1 million posts from between February 1981 and June 1991 from Henry Spencer's UTZOO NetNews Archive are archived at the Usenet Archive for anyone to browse. This latest archive-dump is part of an even larger project by Jarosciak. He launched the Usenet Archive site last month, as a way to host groups in a way that'd be independent of Google Groups, which also holds archives of newsgroups like Usenet. It's currently archiving 317 million posts in 10,000 unique Usenet newsgroups, according to the site -- and Jarosciak estimates it'll eventually hold close to 1 billion posts.
This week, Jarosciak uploaded some of the oldest Usenet posts available to the internet. Around 2.1 million posts from between February 1981 and June 1991 from Henry Spencer's UTZOO NetNews Archive are archived at the Usenet Archive for anyone to browse. This latest archive-dump is part of an even larger project by Jarosciak. He launched the Usenet Archive site last month, as a way to host groups in a way that'd be independent of Google Groups, which also holds archives of newsgroups like Usenet. It's currently archiving 317 million posts in 10,000 unique Usenet newsgroups, according to the site -- and Jarosciak estimates it'll eventually hold close to 1 billion posts.
alt.binaries or bust (Score:3, Insightful)
Really, the only thing I'd be interested from the halcyon days of Usenet is to see the classic pirated content. Reading necroposts about late 80s/early 90s politics, (then) current events, and TV shows just seems kind of tragic. Hell, even old Reddit posts from 2016 haven't aged well.
Re:alt.binaries or bust (Score:5, Interesting)
What is really interesting in it, was the growth of open course political discourse, all over discussing all sorts and having really major impacts on politics, not just locally but nationally and internationally.
Never before seen in humanity, open political discourse having real impact on outcomes, the sharing of ideas internationally and then individuals acting independently locally, the growth of 'Anonymous' as anarchist political activism, where it is the political activism takes precedence over the individual identifying themselves by that political activism and of course provides multiple layers of obfuscation through lack of real connections the ideas are just openly shared.
Slashdot is not that old thought but it's older posts would be interesting.
Re: (Score:1)
It's Chester The Molester!
Why don't you have a seat.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
There are *a lot* of missing groups from that quoted time period. It's seems to be a very selective, arbitrary list of groups and dates.
Re:alt.binaries or bust (Score:4, Insightful)
or perhaps you could also say that never before in humanity ruling elites had access to tools allowing them to brainwash their respective populations, as propaganda tailored to individual preferences has never been possible to achieve even in the era of TV. it has never been that easy to push a few buttons and have the MSM send the manufactured narrative to millions, with a cadre of obedient self-selected self-censoring journalists picking it up and finding different reasons to reinforce (because those that don't comply cannot really make a career in journalism anymore).
if anything is interesting about the archive, it's the state of political discourse before the internet ushered in the post-truth era and changed it to whose fable is nicer to believe in at this instant.
Re: (Score:3)
I used to enjoy alt.pave.the.earth
It was a early response to global warming and was populated with many scientists and plenty of snark
alt.chrome.the.moon was born of a.p.t.e as a means to provide adequate night lighting for the hypercars
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Most usenet archives that I have seen do not include alt.binaries... for good reason
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I would suggest alt.sex.wizards then
Re: alt.binaries or bust (Score:2)
alt.destroy.the.earth (Score:2)
Think I'm going to take a stroll through the naivety of how we thought we might destroy the earth in the 90s. It may or may not make me feel better about 2020.
Re: (Score:1)
There was a lot of that in sci.nanotech involving gray goo. sci.nanotech seems to have departed to a website in 2015.
The name I remember is alt.wesley.crusher.die.die.die
It's too bad dejanews had to die.die.die and get assimilated by the borgoogle.
Re: (Score:2)
No News is Good News (Score:5, Insightful)
I remember the days of NN newsreader...
And Archie and Veronica search engines...
Pre WWW ( before lynx and mozilla )
Telnet to bulletin board style servers..
FTP to grab images and files...
even 300 baud telephone cradle modems....
It seemed all so fascinating and magical back then....
Now it's a Facebook, ad driven nightmare....
It really isn't as much fun anymore, even with all the new bells and whistles...
Re:No News is Good News (Score:4, Insightful)
If only I had points today.
What I really can't understand is how the millennial generation doesn't understand, or doesn't want to understand the importance of what the internet was. It was free speech, not regulated by anyone. It made the chans look G rated in comparison. I don't agree with racism, but at the same time I don't see the problem in letting racism have its own little alcove on the internet. I don't see a problem with the anarchist cookbook. I don't see a problem with the multitude of trolls that have inhabited slash over the years (Turd Report, GNAA)
It's sort of like bad neighborhoods. They don't affect me because I choose not to go there.
Re:No News is Good News (Score:5, Interesting)
Sure we didn't see a problem. But we hadn't seen the impact of what would happen when it mainstreamed.
Ironically I had a more detailed response to this, but something I've never encountered in the many many years I've been here called the "lameness filter" kicked in and blocked it.
Seriously slashdot? Your not even gonna tell me what tripped your idiotic filter off?
Re: No News is Good News (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Oh right. Yeah I had a post about the prevailing conspiracy theory THOSE guys had, and the impact it had on the world.
Probably to stop the clowns who keep spamming swastikkas in here.
Re: (Score:2)
There's a whole bunch of filters appeared in the last few weeks. I can't even type an ellipsis any more because it looks like "ASCII art".
But they still can't turn those special Apple quotes into ordinary ones.
(actually, I'm glad of that. It let's me know who the Apple users are...)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:3)
Slashdot is using it very unsuccessfully to banish hate from Slashdot. What it's actually doing is pissing on the users who come to this site in good faith.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Slashdot IS one of the bad neighborhoods now. Full of Soviet-bloc style tenements, relics of a bygone era. Broken pavement. Busted windows. Unkempt weeds growing wild in every yard. Cars with duct tape over missing windows. Liquor stores and check cashing services on every corner. Nervous stares peeking through blinds. A disturbing number of chalk outlines on the sidewalk.
Smart folks packed up and left ages ago
Re: (Score:3)
It really wasn't the free speech paradise you make it out to be. For a start most people got access through their university or employer, who would take a dim view of the kind of behaviour common on chan boards.
It quickly devolved once access got easier, creating a need for moderated and closed groups. BBS systems (via dial up or telnet) were usually heavily moderated and news servers didn't carry groups they didn't like the sound of at all.
Compared to the stuff that goes down on 4chan and the like the Anar
Re: (Score:3)
There were still moderated groups, which became necessary for the scientific and academic groups as the first trolls began to make on topic discussions difficult. As I recall, the alt.* structure was thrown in for the free for all and to preserve the other trees. There was also the notion of netiquette.
Re: (Score:2)
Ludwig von Plutonium and Professor Alexander Abian (yes, he was really an emeritus at Iowa State) would like to disagree with you about moderators being present in sci.physics.
Ludwig was just a troll but Abian was clearly mentally gone by that time in his life.
Re: (Score:2)
That's why there was usually a sci group and then a sci.*.mod group. The former for general discussion, the latter that was moderated. Some of the groups I was on had robomoderators that mainly blocked either some keywords or just some sources, or limited based on number of posts in a certain period of time. That didn't stop the trolls of the day, but it certainly slowed them down. Some of the technical groups ended moving to mailing lists because it was a lot easier to assert posting controls through a mai
Re: (Score:2)
You forget that we *could* control the idiots. Fair Use meant we could complain to the sysadmin of the poster.
Ah, yes, the ISP that Canter and Siegel posted the first universal spam, the Green Card spam, crashed three times in the 24 hours following their spam under the weight of incoming complaints, and tossed them off.
Re:No News is Good News (Score:5, Insightful)
FTP? I don't recall Usenet being set up for FTP. I used to get binaries that had been uuencoded into an ASCII and convert them back to binary using uudecode.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uuencoding [wikipedia.org]
It's been a long time, but, as I recall, the hard part was getting a uudecode program in the first place. I think I finally came across the source code of a version in Basic on Usenet that I could download and run thru a Basic interpreter to get a more efficient binary uudecode.
Those were the days when some people still used UUCP (Unix to Unix Copy, I won't even provide a link because you don't want to know) over serial lines and one was always having to find adapters to convert modem and null-modem cables, and gender benders to match up male and female connectors.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
That's how I ended up with my own feed. A friend of mines ran a bbs and he had a Usenet feed. I have $10 a month and he let me grab a chunk of the feed off of him. My first email address was off of my UUCP node. And yes. It was a bitch to set up
Re: (Score:2)
Getting uudecode for PC wasn't terribly difficult. What was harder was getting a useful shell and set of accompanying programs so you could unpack SHARs. Ugh.
I used UUPC on my literal IBM PC (5150) and later on a 286, but then I installed Xenix on that 286 and it was finally a well-behaved UUCP node. Later I ran AmigaUUCP, which was also very good.
Re: (Score:2)
There was this old BBS software called WaffleBBS, which I used for my BBS. The DOS version had a reasonably well performing UUCP command. Even after I shut my BBS down, I ran the UUCP portion of Waffle in OS/2 in a DOS VDM until I managed to get a native OS/2 port of UUCP going. It worked pretty well, once I had the right UART, because the shitty UART that ended up in a lot of PCs at the time was a polling one, which really fucked with performance.
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, for "high" speed serial you wanted a 16550A IIRC, and most PCs had a lesser UART. I also used waffle briefly, and yeah, it had functional UUCP.
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, for "high" speed serial you wanted a 16550A IIRC, and most PCs had a lesser UART. .
Yeah, I remember having to buy a 1-port serial card with a 16550 so that my 386 PC could keep up with my new, blindingly fast 9600 baud modem.
Re: (Score:1)
You'd use FTP to connect to a server, navigate to a folder, and download files (don't forget to switch to binary!)
Fascinating that the protocol is still the best option for downloading files.
Re: (Score:2)
well, sftp is required now
I remember taking any url or company name and opening ftp.whateveryouwantedtouse.com and being able to access dozens of ftp accounts with nary a password in site
tons of fun
Re: (Score:2)
I found a box of serial break outs, adapters I don't remember the names for and myriad scsi and parallel adapters and cables. And wiring diagrams for plotters as big as a VW.
Re: (Score:2)
And those damn licensing dongles
Re: (Score:2)
FTP? I don't recall Usenet being set up for FTP. I used to get binaries that had been uuencoded into an ASCII and convert them back to binary using uudecode.
Back in the late 80s and early 90s, I used a VT102 (or an emulator) to login to a shell account on a University's unix mainframe. Once logged on, I would use rn to read Usenet. When I wanted to download binaries, I'd decode them using uudecode on the shell account. To actually see the images --and free up my disk quota -- I had to more the decoded binaries to my PC and that's where FTP or Kermit came in.
Re: (Score:1)
But otoh, as a maker, you find tons of information that didn't exist in the old days.
Re: (Score:2)
It seemed all so fascinating and magical back then....
Now it's a Facebook, ad driven nightmare....
It really isn't as much fun anymore, even with all the new bells and whistles...
I miss the BBS days where everyone you interacted with was in the local calling range. I made most of my friends that way.
Re: (Score:2)
and gopher, never forget gopher
Silver Threads Among The Gold.... (Score:2)
Now it's a Facebook, ad driven nightmare....
It really isn't as much fun anymore, even with all the new bells and whistles
What I remember is jargon-ridden client software that only a geek could love. Billing by the hour over and above your by-the-minute Telco charges. That world ended with AOL and flat-rate monthly billing for local phine calls.
Excuse me if I'm not interested (Score:2)
I highly doubt the quality of discussion is any higher than at present. For proof, see above.
Re: (Score:2)
Yep. Some things really don't need to be preserved.
Imagine 20 years of Slashdot comments. Who's gonna sit through that?
Re: (Score:2)
"Imagine 20 years of Slashdot comments. "
But that way, we could finally find out the 3 people who actually RTFA.
Obvious. (Score:2)
A/S/L?
Went straight to alt.sex.pictures.d (Score:5, Funny)
Has anyone got the specification for GIF87a and/or GIF89a? Please e-mail any specification (or code) (or names of FTP sites to get the information from.
Thanks god for being born as a millennial.
Re: (Score:1)
I went straight to alt.sex.pictures.d, and what did I found?
Has anyone got the specification for GIF87a and/or GIF89a? Please e-mail any specification (or code) (or names of FTP sites to get the information from.
Thanks god for being born as a millennial.
Oh that just cracks me up.
Re: (Score:2)
"Please e-mail any specification (or code) (or names of FTP sites to get the information from."
*Pulls out gun and shoots poster of this dreck.*
Answers are always, *always*, ALWAYS to be posted back to the forum, so that others can see them and profit from them. Never privately emailed where no one will ever see them.
Any problematic posts? (Score:2)
40 years is a long time to stay NOT cancelled. Too long.
Re: (Score:2)
That's what occurred to me. How many present day tech CEOs were shit poasting on Usenet in their 20's and are about to have their careers cancelled.
Re: (Score:2)
That's what occurred to me. How many present day tech CEOs were shit poasting on Usenet in their 20's and are about to have their careers cancelled.
A lot I'd bet. Back in the day we never thought about "cancel culture" and had free discourse as it was meant to be. Now every thing you do is looked up and evaluated before you even land a fscking job.
Re: (Score:2)
It wasn't that great... (Score:2)
Well I was there for it. It wasn't that great.
It was certainly a much higher discourse than we experience on the Internet today.
We remember it as "great" because of nostalgia. It was better than today... but never "great".
Re: (Score:1)
alt.sex.bondage? Where Mike Godwin spent most of his time with his first secretary, a bouncy round little redhead nicknamed Lovely Rita Meter Maid who was really into handcuffs? They both published their ads through anon.pentifi, the old anonymous reposting service. Now *that* I would give a lot to read the old archives for, but the site was closed when the Scientologists and Interpol raided them.
The early days of the Electronic Frontier Foundation involved a *lot* that never showed up in their newsletters.
Re: (Score:2)
I remember zipping up the flame proof suit in various forums due to apple/pc/unix holy wars, that and the Fudd/Devilbunny conflict(s)
For the most part it was all good fun, I gave my best work to alt.chrome.the.moon, because it was truly a notable cause
Hah just searching new groups few weeks ago (Score:2)
on raves in Vancouver. Oldest post I found from 1992 https://groups.google.com/g/al... [google.com]
History, oh my. (Score:5, Interesting)
I really hope they don't find my old posts in there...
Re: (Score:2)
That was my first thought, too. I didn't go anonymous for most posts until the late 90s.
Interesting. /. now won't let me put three periods in a row in the middle of a sentence, because it thinks it's ascii art...
God, this. (Score:2)
My early 20's musings need to stay deep in the memory hole. Fortunately they (barely) predate my using this username.
Should put it all on IPFS (Score:3, Interesting)
The trouble with news was the need for a server to store the entire feed. The network wasn't fast, so it had to be decentralized: every server storing everything, updates being sent over land-line connections. That was OK for text-based discussion groups. Then the binaries groups got to be the most popular, and hogged enormous amounts of disk space.
But I can imagine writing a new nntp server using the same front-end protocol, but using IPFS for storage and server-server transfers. Then it would only take a few servers in the world to redundantly pin all the content, while most servers would just fetch and cache locally the content that the clients are requesting. So you can use all the classic news readers. That way the whole experience would look just like it did in the 90's, rather than being a web-based facsimile, and yet the server storage requirements would be affordable enough for anybody to run one on any old Linux box.
Write it in Rust or Go, of course, so that it's compiled into one executable with few dependencies.
Re: (Score:2)
Indeed. Whole megabytes of data. Imagine that!
Those were the days ...
Re: (Score:2)
I had the news server rusting in my garage until a few years ago. 20 2gb scsi drives and a 486 cpu.
Re: (Score:2)
Thanks for making me feel old, Slashdot (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not so much about the dates being mentioned - it's more how the submission felt it necessary to explain what Usenet was.
Re: (Score:2)
The tool used to demonstrate that you should never underestimate the bandwidth of a 93 Escort Wagon full of backup tapes
Shouldn't they already be on Google Groups? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
The old "alt.binaries" were a lot like BitTorrent today. with a great deal of access to copyright violating material but also a great deal of deliberately incomplete multi-part archives designed to overwhelm and poison the groups. Usenet changed a great deal when "cancel" messages became critical to controlling spammers, and when the old INN software was updated to automatically include the IP address of the host submitting the message. Even if other IP addresses were deliberately forged, it provided a way
Comes back to bite you (Score:2)
Why? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
alt.pave.the.earth
Finally! (Score:1)
2.1 Million of the Oldest Usenet Posts Are Now Onl (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
It was a messaging system distributed via TCP with NNTP (or UUCP over SLIP). There were probably some alternative ways to build a Usenet feed, but somewhere along the line it had to plug into the Internet.
Re: (Score:3)
It was a messaging system distributed via TCP with NNTP (or UUCP over SLIP). There were probably some alternative ways to build a Usenet feed, but somewhere along the line it had to plug into the Internet.
You could build your own little nets that didn't have to connect to the internet ever, using just UUCP over modems, and transfer mail, news, and arbitrary files.
Re: (Score:3)
Yes, and that's how I got email and Usenet for a few years. But sooner or later, there had to be a parent UUCP node that integrated the batched messages into NNTP and SMTP networks. UUCP was an alternative ramp, but it was really just a file copy system, and then a daemon on a server somewhere would pick up those batches, split them back into their msg files and then hand them off to the NNTP or SMTP server.
Re: (Score:2)
I aM l33t d00dZ! (Score:2)
Seems to go back only to 2003 (Score:2)
The the AOLers came in and spoiled all the threads. I still remember chuckling over a post allegedly posted by an AOL user id complaining about how aolers are messing up everything that was good for God and Country. That was in my days of waning interest in usenet.
Not that it was all hunky dory before. There were gems, early crowd sourced consumer reviews like the Indian Travel Agents Survey. And tons of useful tips in many comp.lang.c++ etc, Bjarne Stro
Re: (Score:3)
I remember when Douglas Adams would post on occasion to talk.origins. Ah, the early days!
Re: (Score:2)
I remember being burned to a crisp by Randal Schwartz (as Merlin on teleport) for a misguided comment :)
Death of Usenet (Score:1)
I'm old enough to remember one of the earliest "Death of Usenet" scares: The creation of the 100th newsgroup, long before the Great Renaming.
"Your message will cost the net hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars to send everywhere. Are you absolutely sure you want to do this?"
The internet does not forget (Score:3)
You think your awkward posts are gone forever when a service shuts down? Someone will upload an archive in a few decades.
No, need you young whippersnappers (Score:2)
We wrote most of them!
And Google Groups should have most of them too.
In the olden days, with slow modems, alt.tasteless.jokes were our only fun at work.
https://groups.google.com/g/al... [google.com]
But now it's mostly Spam.
Can't even find my old posts... (Score:2)
I was pretty active on Usenet for a long time...
Looking through this, I can't seem to find any my old posts... I think they are probably in there, I just can't quite remember what groups I was in most frequently, or seemingly even the handle I used to post under...
Cool to have this accessible (and searchable) though.
Sounds like Archive.org should get involved (Score:2)
Good (Score:2)
Because I've been dreading the day that Google might decide to shut down groups.google.com, possibly without warning, thus erasing decades of Usenet history. They already started fucking around with the interface, using larger fonts/less content on the screen, pandering to the Lowest Fucking Common Denominator. It's only a matter of time before GG users are told by Google to go fuck themselves.
I'm glad somebody is doing the work to prevent the loss of Usenet history.
hahaha (Score:1)
Prehistoric times! (Score:1)
*Now* online? (Score:1)
At the very least, I know they are available in Telehack [telehack.com], and have been for years, and I can't believe this is the only place.
From the Telehack manual: