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.
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.
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?
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.
Is it possible to get nostalgic for the present?