
How a handful of geeks defied the USSR - paulgerhardt
http://owni.fr/2011/03/13/how-a-handful-of-geeks-defied-the-ussr/
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olegp
I was a kid at the time and we had a Taiwanese IBM PC AT (12MHz 286) clone at
home in Moscow which my dad who is a research scientist used for work. He
bought it unofficially and it cost more than an apartment. I remember making a
very simple space shooter in Turbo Basic on it.

For three days during the putsch the computer would not turn on. We still
don't know why. Amazingly, the computer still works.

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ekidd
How can Usenet work without the Internet? Simple: Usenet sites can also
communicate using uucp, the Unix-to-Unix Copy Protocol, which copied email and
netnews from one system to another over dialup links.

For those of us who are slightly younger, think of FidoNET and you'll have the
right general idea.

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phishphood
I ran one of the Relcom nodes at the time. It was a major pain to setup but
once we got going the service was very reliable. Our setup wasn't UNIX based
though, it was a home grown UUCP peer-to-peer client running on DOS, I think
it was called UUPC if I am not mistaken.

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joshu
Sigh. Usenet wasn't a chat room. Message board is a better analogy.

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elwin
Some technical details about Usenet during the coup:
[http://groups.google.com/group/talk.politics.soviet/browse_t...](http://groups.google.com/group/talk.politics.soviet/browse_thread/thread/ca0ded2bd9bdbf5c)

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sireat
Nice tidbit: "Relcom now boasts about 100 nodes and as much as half a gigabyte
of traffic each day".

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metageek
> _Thus the first cyber-activists were able to use this decentralized
> architecture and Usenet (developed in the USSR in 1982)_

...what? Newsgroups[1] were developed in the US, in 1980.

[1] Not all newsgroups are Usenet; Usenet is the set of newsgroups
administered via news.admin.

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VomisaCaasi
Wired has produced a good article how little connected Russians actually were
at this time.

<http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/1.04/russnet_pr.html>

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Montagist
This'd probably make a good movie. It's like Wargames meets Real Genius. Haha

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dshankar
Is the cup concrete? I'm having an discussion with #sthatipamala and #ericz -
I'm pretty sure it's fake, as it looks like the guys fingers are depressing
into the foam.

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dshankar
Sorry posted on the wrong thread (damn you iPhone)...

