
The Early History of Usenet, Part I: The Technological Setting - longdefeat
https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/blog/2019-11/2019-11-14a.html
======
simonblack
Back in the early 90s, when a _fast_ modem was still excruciatingly slow, a
webpage could (and did!) take tens of _minutes_ to load. I tried downloading a
six megabyte file once which used up about 4 hours of my monthly quota, only
for the file transfer to be aborted right near the end. I nearly cried.

Most of us then used UUCP to send and receive our email, usenet, etc from the
Net. A typical call lasted 15 to 20 minutes sometimes.

Only the rich power-users could afford to log in more than once a day, it was
too expensive otherwise. And the service providers were charging an arm and a
leg per hour, with a monthly contract total of say 30 hours.

Around that time, one of the local members of the user-group posted to say
that he had sent an email across the Net to the US, and had received a reply
within 10 minutes! We were astounded at the speed of that turnaround.

Also about then, somebody told us that they had heard that the total number of
computers on the Net had reached a whole million. Again, we were astounded. We
literally couldn't envisage that within a decade, that number would reach
billions.

And don't get me started on how twitchy I got when the 'always-on' broadband
era arrived. I kept getting thoughts of thousands and thousands of dollars of
provider charges racking up every month. <grin>

~~~
pmoriarty
I was on the net in the early 90's and before, and maybe I'm wearing my rose-
colored glasses today, but I don't recall any web pages taking anywhere close
to ten minutes to load. Maybe a minute at worst. I don't think I'd have had
the patience to browse the web otherwise.

Though computers were less powerful and network speeds were comparably slow,
web pages were mostly really lightweight back then, not the bloated
monstrosities we have today (though even then there were some atrocious ad-
infested websites, which were slow.. but not 10 minutes per page slow, in my
experience).

Also, I seem to recall that downloading my first mp3, which was about 3 MB in
size took around 30 minutes back in the day.

I don't doubt that downloading that 4 MB file and viewing that webpage was as
slow for you as you reported, but I do wonder if maybe you were using a really
old modem for they day. I think by the time I first started accessing the
internet I must have had a 9600 baud modem, and not many years later switched
to 56k ISDN. How about you?

PS: I just remembered that pretty early on in the web's history, I read about
some study which found that if a website responded in more than 200
milliseconds, most people considered that slow, and I remember thinking that
that observation fit pretty well with my experience. So I think pretty much
from the beginning websites must have overall been responding in well under a
second as a rule, and even back in the day taking a full minute (nevermind 10
minutes) would have been considered unacceptably slow.

~~~
kjs3
Yeah...back in the 90s, a webpage was a text file, usually a couple of Kb
tops, maybe a small gif or three. No pulling in Mb of frameworks, no client
side executable content, just plain content. If it took 10m to load at 9600,
you were doing it wrong (or were targeting the folks with DDS/T1/T3
connectivity). If you were serving out a big file, you often did it over FTP.

------
not2b
The first FLOSS I ever contributed to was 2.11B News, the standard Usenet
software of the day, back in 1985 or so. I ran a Eunice system (a kludge that
ran Unix on top of VMS) for a startup, and wanted to get us on Usenet; earlier
I had a job at a Navy lab that was on the ARPAnet and felt cut off. Larry Wall
(himself) had done some Eunice patches for an earlier version, and I ported
them to work on the new system. The only tricky part was faking links, since
Eunice didn't support them. 300 baud modems and magnetic tapes by mail were
the only way to move your data around.

~~~
bbanyc
To this day, the Configure script for Perl still outputs "Congratulations. You
aren't running Eunice."

[https://github.com/Perl/perl5/blob/blead/Configure#L4614](https://github.com/Perl/perl5/blob/blead/Configure#L4614)

~~~
schoen
Wow, I had somehow forgotten about those chatty diagnostics about the Perl
build system's reasoning about your local OS (maybe due to not having had to
compile Perl recently?). They're awesome.

~~~
dredmorbius
Classic _Perl Journal_ , September, 1998:

[https://www.flickr.com/photos/bjepson/139075091/](https://www.flickr.com/photos/bjepson/139075091/)

------
TomMasz
I was amazed by Usenet when I first encountered it. Communicating with people
around the globe really seemed like the future had arrived. The company I
worked for would connect to the University of Rochester via a Telebit
Trailblazer modem and from there U of R would connect to the Internet. I
recall our sysadmin complaining the daily bundle was nearing 80 Meg and was
straining disk space on our Sun server.

------
vesinisa
Absolutely riveting article. But I must note that the page is quite obnoxious
to read on a mobile device. I'd prefer the content alone and none of the
decorations around it..

E: uBlock Origin rule to block the footer on e.g. Firefox Android:

    
    
        www.cs.columbia.edu###footer

------
foobar_
Usenet is probably the most decentralized medium out there. If I am not
mistaken, this how the protocol worked ... data was posted to one server, then
every other server replicated the data for each client to consume. Typically
the server had like a years retention for binaries and an archive for text-
based stuff.

Usenet is sorta like mastodon and Reddit combined.

~~~
not2b
Originally the UUCP protocol was used, and most Usenet sites had no network
connection other than a dialup modem (other than perhaps a local Ethernet, if
that). Retention time was only a few days: available disk was very limited.
Later, the NNTP protocol was developed to transfer Usenet over TCP/IP, which
is what you're thinking of.

~~~
icedchai
The UUCP protocol was still used to enable the replication he described. Also,
it was not black and white, UUCP or NNTP. For example, for a while I ran a
local NNTP server and received news through UUCP.

------
mcswell
I made my first internet (or was it arpanet?) purchase in about 1986, using
Usenet. Usenet had for-sale listings, subdivided by region; I was working at
Boeing Computer Services (part of Boeing, but a part that no longer exists),
and had Usenet access. My wife said she wanted a dishwasher. I told her she
had married one, but that didn't seem to work.

One day I saw an ad for a portable dishwasher on the Usenet for-sale in my
area. Contacted the guy (email? phone? I can't remember). We connected, and I
bought it. I think both our wives were astonished at what computers could do.

Took the dishwasher with us to Colombia a couple years later, and sold it a
few years later for what I had paid + shipping. Now say that about your modern
internet purchases!

------
icedchai
This brings back memories. I ran a UUCP node when I was in high school, back
in the early 90's. I had a feed from another local, who connected to a system
somewhere on the west coast. This gave me internet email and about a dozen
newsgroups...

------
ddingus
I loved USENET. Still do for the few comp.sys groups I visit and that are
still active.

~~~
jandrese
I loved how efficient it was. Unfortunately, that was also the downfall as it
allowed people to spam efficiently.

I'm still bummed that everything went to the web instead of trying to fix the
moderation problem on the Usenet. I have never seen an online discussion forum
as fast and featureful as my old Usenet client.

~~~
TMWNN
Reddit, despite its own flaws, is the closest thing to Usenet in terms of a
text-oriented display with keyboard-heavy navigation (with Reddit Enhancement
Suite).

~~~
jandrese
Reddit is definitely closest to the old Usenet experience, but its search
engine and filters leave something to be desired.

~~~
anthk
I prefer uncensored.citadel.org. Yes, no https support, but you can login over
SSH with ssh bbs@uncensored.citadel.org and use it as a modern BBS. It works
great.

~~~
jandrese
I'm not in love with the interface to be honest. It's great if you want to
consume absolutely everything, but if you want to pick and choose in a topic
thread there isn't a summary view as far as I can tell. It's kind of like
reading specific #hashtags on Twitter.

------
antihero
The articles get better and better, can't wait for part IV.

------
DonHopkins
"PC Pursuit" was a flat rate service offered by GTE Telenet that let you side-
step long distance fees by dialing into Telenet locally and dialing out on
banks of modems in other cities, to access BBSs, UUCP servers, etc.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telenet#PC_Pursuit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telenet#PC_Pursuit)

Remotely accessible shared modems had some amusing security flaws: "PC
Roulette" was a fun game you could play by connecting to a modem in some city
and typing "A/" to redial the last number it called, to discover all kinds of
weird random BBSs, Unix boxes, FidoNet nodes, and other services.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayes_command_set#The_basic_Ha...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayes_command_set#The_basic_Hayes_command_set)

>In the late 1980s, Telenet offered a service called PC Pursuit. For a flat
monthly fee, customers could dial into the Telenet network in one city, then
dial out on the modems in another city to access bulletin board systems and
other services. PC Pursuit was popular among computer hobbyists because it
sidestepped long-distance charges. In this sense, PC Pursuit was similar to
the Internet.

[https://www.templetons.com/brad/nethist.html](https://www.templetons.com/brad/nethist.html)

>PC-Pursuit (Telnet) flat rate off-peak modem calls

[http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/library/CONCEPTS/SERVICES/PCPU...](http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/library/CONCEPTS/SERVICES/PCPURSUIT/)

>"Doing PCP all night can be legal. ;-)"

[http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/library/CONCEPTS/SERVICES/PCPU...](http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/library/CONCEPTS/SERVICES/PCPURSUIT/pcpnonew.txt)

>[Moderator's Note: There is an interesting history behind the whole thing.
Prior to about 1984 when PC Pursuit began operation, Telenet had their data
network going, which dates from sometime in the 1970's. Like the phone
network, it was busy all day and almost deserted all night. Telenet started PC
Pursuit as a way to make use of all the facilities sitting idle all night
long. I was one of the first half-dozen or so users to sign up for PC Pursuit
when it started operation back then. They used a clumsy, rather tedious call-
back system where you dialed in, entered your (authorized) call-back number,
disconnected and waited for their return call to put you on the network. There
were about five cities we could call in the beginning, at 300/1200 baud only.
PC Pursuit was greatly improved upon as the years went by. For many years they
even offered _unlimited_ access between 6 PM and 7 AM for $25 per month. It
was such a good deal they eventually had to put limits on the amount of time
people could use the service each month without extra payment. I would not be
surprised if they are now swamped beyond their capacity to handle the traffic.
PAT]

[http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/library/CONCEPTS/SERVICES/PCPU...](http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/library/CONCEPTS/SERVICES/PCPURSUIT/hackpcp.htm)

>The PASSWORDS are varied. They are initially registered to the user in the
format of XXXXyyyy where XXXX are four letters and yyyy are four digits...

>NOW, your saving grace from people changing their passwords is that Telenet
charges $5.00 for each password change... So this helps...

What a great business model: charge customers $5 to change their password! Why
didn't I think of that???

------
russfink
WOW HEY ... ANYWUN REMBER BIFF AND HIS BROTHERS VIC 20?

