
The geeks who saved Usenet (2002) - ern
http://dir.salon.com/story/tech/feature/2002/01/07/saving_usenet/print.html
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doctoboggan
Sometimes I wish I was old enough to have experienced the early days of the
internet, and then I remember that we are still in the early days of the
internet.

Is it possible to get nostalgic for the present?

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jasonkester
Ironic title, considering that Google actually could have saved the Usenet
when they took the DejaNews archives and spun them into Google Groups. All
they needed to do was invest in some basic spam filtering and they could have
gotten on top of it.

But they didn't. And the Usenet died in a sea of uncontested spam.

The amazing thing is that nothing rose up to replace it. Everybody pretty much
just gave up. Maybe a few communities limped on in the form of phpbb boards,
but not in the same sense. Rec.climbing, alt.surfing, sci.space.tech, and all
the comp.sci.programming groups pretty much just evaporated into nothingness.

If somebody had come along and simply tried to keep it all going, I can't
imagine it not working. But nobody did.

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rwl4
I was reading a very old thread from the 80's once and felt the urge to reply
not thinking of the date of the OP. Then I looked at the date of the post and
it suddenly hit me how much time had passed and if I were to reply the
original author has no chance of ever seeing my reply... Trips me out. Anybody
else experienced anything like this?

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ck2
1981 usenet is hard to fathom.

But the first 5 1/4 hard drive came out in 1980 so it's possible some ancient
history is buried somewhere in a landfill.

~~~
dmethvin
Very few micros (such as the original Mac or IBM PC) would have been used to
store and forward significant Usenet traffic. Most of it would have been on
DEC VAX disk packs.

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dreamdu5t
Interesting that the Arpanet list was lost... Causes you to wonder what is
being lost now.

