
Usenet, updated in real time as it was thirty years ago - ukandy
http://www.olduse.net/
======
logicallee
what will really blow your mind is that thirty years from now some wise-ass
will do the same with hackernews, and everyone will laugh at how shitty it
looked, and that this is the group that built $10 billion companies from
nothing but scrappiness, making something people want, and shipping.

Let's admit it. HN is not a highly polished web UI - there's not even thread
collapsing. It works because it doesn't matter; we're communicating and
sharing wisdom.

And for you wise-asses from the future: THIS IS NOT THE BEST WE CAN DO IN
TERMS OF UI. Just like there were cutting-edge films in 1984 with lots of
visual effects, we could have a much richer interface today if we wanted.
We're not primitive - we don't care! In fact, future wise-ass, what have YOU
built today? Why not pick a problem and solve it rather than snickering at the
ancient past :)

~~~
ilyanep
I think the UI actually works for HN in the same way it worked for reddit back
in the day. A very minimalistic interface lets the content be king and scares
away people who aren't interested enough in the content itself.

The one thing I will agree with you on is thread collapsing, but I've
installed a Chrome add-on that lets me do that.

~~~
cothomps
The great thing about USENET was (and well, is) that news is a protocol so you
could choose from a few different clients if the UX for one was horrible. Not
a panacea, but it was nice to have that kind of competition.

------
reitzensteinm
I wasn't born then, so I don't know how frequently the recent posts change. I
thought I'd share this for posterity.

As sad as the post is, I think it really highlights how much the world has
changed in just a generation. I hope our kids look back at the world of today
with similar distaste. We still have a long way to go.

[http://article.olduse.net/52@decwrl.UUCP](http://article.olduse.net/52@decwrl.UUCP)

~~~
percept
Same old debates, it seems. LGBT rights in that one, gun ownership in this
one:

[http://article.olduse.net/2447@tekig.UUCP](http://article.olduse.net/2447@tekig.UUCP)

~~~
jonah
And the NSA:

[http://article.olduse.net/14337@mgweed.UUCP](http://article.olduse.net/14337@mgweed.UUCP)

[http://article.olduse.net/839%40houxf.UUCP](http://article.olduse.net/839%40houxf.UUCP)

[http://article.olduse.net/221%40looking.UUCP](http://article.olduse.net/221%40looking.UUCP)

[http://article.olduse.net/237%40celerity.UUCP](http://article.olduse.net/237%40celerity.UUCP)

~~~
davidw
... and any number of other topics that are still controversial in some way or
another. That's one of the reasons I really am loth to see politics on this
site - it tends to be kind of boring in that it's pretty much the same old
stuff.

~~~
jonah
Agreed. (I only shared those because they were the newest posts when I
visited.)

------
justin_
As a person who wasn't even born at the time USENET was popular, I've found
this service very interesting. I was quite surprised when I found one of my
current college professors posting in net.jokes!

If you like this website, you may also enjoy
[http://www.textfiles.com/](http://www.textfiles.com/), a huge collection of
old text documents from the early net (especially BBSes).

------
joeyh
So I'm counting 832 concurrent users in the shared screen session running the
news reader on the front page there. I expect that might be getting a little
slow. I've spun up a few more instances to spead the load around.

------
tach4n
I remember there was a time period not too long ago when the calendar lined
up* with the one from like 1989 or 1992 something like that and 2600 started
releasing a bunch of their editors old radio shows from that year as a weekly
podcast - as if on a ~decade "delay".

I usually only pop on one of their podcasts when I'm really bored, but I
followed most of that while it was happening because of an interesting effect.
For some reason hearing about stuff from the past on the same calendar day and
day of week just really made you connect to it more.

I saw this the other day too, and bookmarked it because it brought that cool
feeling back. It's a really neat idea imo.

* lined up in terms of days of the week - so if the 3rd of March was a Monday the one year, it was the other too

------
rcarmo
I love that font. The VT220 was one of the first terminals I used for an
extended period of time, and I've been using the font on one of my machines
for over a year now for that extra nostalgic feeling...

~~~
lectrick
Do you know about Cathode?

[http://www.secretgeometry.com/apps/cathode/](http://www.secretgeometry.com/apps/cathode/)

~~~
stevenrace
Alternately, there is 'cool-retro-term':

[https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro-
term](https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro-term)

~~~
lectrick
Nice! Can use on my Linux VM.

------
xngzng
I'm hoping there is a startup that modernise Usenet and put a nice UX on top,
similar to what Slack has done to irc. Why should Reddit has all the fun?

~~~
_ZeD_
I'm hoping NOT.

"a nice UX" is what killed the rest of usenet (google groups anyone?)

~~~
ido
What killed GG is that for the longest time it was swamped with spam. Took
them surprisingly long to get on top of that.

------
protomyth
USENET was really the first service I used in 1988 that showed me what this
whole internet things was about. It was so amazing posting messages and seeing
replies from all over the map. The first distributed social network, shame it
all went to heck.

