Olduse.net: a 30-year delayed Usenet feed | Hacker News Reader

Olduse.net: a 30-year delayed Usenet feed

olduse.net

125 pointsdaveloyall33 comments

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Came across this, Stallman announcing GNU. http://article.olduse.net/771@mit-eddie.UUCP

"In the near future I'm fixing to do this ambitious thing" and he actually did... Good on him.

I on the other hand, personally negotiate with my alarm clock every morning.

In case you haven't read them yet. I very highly recommend those two books:

— The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier, by Bruce Sterling.

— The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking A Spy Through The Maze Of Computer Espionage, by Cliff Stoll.

Both are excellent reads, and if you like old Usenet and BBS stories, you'll be served.

EDIT: By the way, the first one is freely available here: http://www.mit.edu/hacker/hacker.html. I have it in paper myself, but surely it is possible to make a good ePub from these HTML pages.

The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier, by Bruce Sterling.

This, especially, since a new generation is facing the exact same battles that Sterling wrote about. We still have computer-illiterate prosecutors going berserk on a regular basis. And thanks to devoted public servants like James Comey, we're going to spend the next couple of Congressional terms rehashing the old arguments over what math equations should constitute a Federal offense.

The government doesn't learn from history, so it's important that the rest of us do.

cliff stoll made an ... interesting movie of this book. its fun to watch and would probably make a good drinking game. : https://youtu.be/EcKxaq1FTac

Thanks for sharing— I was hooked after that insane 30 second intro. Having people play themselves definitely gives the recreations a certain charm.

"The Cuckoo's Egg" is an amazing book. I read it some months back and very much regretted not having read it earlier... It does a fantastic job of bringing 80's computing to life while at the same time boasting a plot stronger and more exciting than many thrillers (though true!).

"The Hacker Crackdown" is worth reading for the historical aspect, but it only deals with crackers, so I personally did not find it particularly engaging. (BTW, an epub is available via Project Gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/101)

A third book that should be mentioned here is "Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution" by Steven Levy, which I'm currently reading. It deals with "real hackers", starting in the 50s at MIT - a deserved classic.

Good idea to mention Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution.

It is indeed also on the list of books that I solidly recommend if anyone's interested: https://pablo.rauzy.name/miscellaneous.html#books ;).

In case you enjoy that terminal font[1] as much as I do, you can download it here:

http://sensi.org/%7Esvo/glasstty/Glass_TTY_VT220.ttf

[1] http://blog.fosketts.net/2015/10/06/the-best-mac-os-x-termin...

The dl link is dead. :(

works for me.

Here is a working link: http://aperma.link/Glass_TTY_VT220.ttf

I was extremely bored at work, so I made this "fake hacker" demo with the font: https://forty7.org/tmp/font_test.html

For those who cannot download the link, I have a copy of the font on my website too: https://forty7.org/tmp/fonts/Glass_TTY_VT220.ttf

This is my default font in iTerm, where I spend hours every day.

Somebody else mentioned (one of the) link(s) is dead, I can post the .ttf file if anyone wants it.

I've found several of this 'line scan' type terminal fonts in the past (and yes, I am a veteran of DEC VTs) - but unfortunately none of them render properly on Windows at lower point sizes - has anyone else had this problem?

It' stretched vertically.

Apologies for the overloaded terminal emulator on the website which is not letting many people run tin. Was not really expecting to be randomly on HN 5 years deep into olduse.net's run.

The architecture, for the curious, is simply shellinabox serving up a shared screen session with tin in it run on a couple of VMs. That doesn't scale super well.

Since it's been 5 years since I put that together, it's probably feasible now to simply compile tin to javascript with emscripten, run the whole thing out of the user's browser, and tunnel the nntp traffic out to the news server. Would scale much better. If someone would like a fun little project..

(In 10 years, the size of the whole olduse.net archive will probably be not much larger than the size of the average web page, and I can upload a single static file implementing olduse.net to IPFS?)

So, I just have to wait 2 years to see what I wrote from a terminal on an IBM 370. I do wonder if any of it will make much sense this far out.

Be sure to check back on November 11th 2018, which is when the Morris worm will hit olduse.net.

Will you be infecting it with the worm for old times' sake? ;)

Interestingly, this is from the same person (joeyh) who makes git-annex.

Also (2014). Or (1986), depending on your point of view.

Indeed! That guy is the patron saint of contemporary neck-beards.

He also built much of the Debian infrastructure, ikiwiki (a wiki/blog engine), etckeeper and a bunch of other good stuff: https://joeyh.name/code/

And much of that was done on an off-grid solar-powered netbook, too: https://usesthis.com/interviews/joey.hess/

His "notes for a caretaker" are both interesting and weirdly voyeuristic (from the oblique way parts of his life are revealed): https://joeyh.name/blog/entry/notes_for_a_caretaker/

https://archive.org/details/utzoo-wiseman-usenet-archive

First thing I see is a post by a Matt Dillon about creating sub-processes. Wonder if it's Matt Dillon the DragonflyBSD guy.

30 years ago he was "the Amiga guy".

I was wondering where the surge in articles requested was coming from... Cool to see it reposted.

The first year or so the stream of articles was so small that it was easy to read everything posted to olduse.net every day :-)

Compare and contast http://oldweb.today/ -- which lets you browse Internet Archive'd sites with browsers of their era.

(via jwz)

<line-eater, are you there ?>

And now we know that the "NSA line-eater" was maybe not so mythical, after all (though not responsible for actually eating lines).

You’ll have to wait a few years for Linux to be announced...

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