How a handful of geeks defied the USSR

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.

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.

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.

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

Some technical details about Usenet during the coup: http://groups.google.com/group/talk.politics.soviet/browse_t...

>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.

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

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

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.