80s Usenet first cultural references | Hacker News Reader

80s Usenet first cultural references

eightyeightynine.com

93 pointsmbustamanter29 comments

Most of the cultural references from early Usenet are missing, because the social and political groups weren't saved, with few exceptions. The early archives came from Henry Spencer and only included what he thought was worth saving.

Many of us old timers are grateful for that: we posted some very embarrassing stuff, using our real names.

Tell me about it. I missed the cutoff of embarrassment protection...

I am first mentioned 5/2/89. I was having fun writing MASM programs and released about 50 freeware programs around then. I used bulletin boards rather than Usenet back then. Usenet access usually required a toll call.

https://groups.google.com/g/comp.graphics/c/bu7GRoqEHHI/m/6q...

-Keith

Unfortunately, thanks to Discord and all the other walled gardens we won't see this quality of historic trivia being archived for future generations.

I was a big usenet and mailing list fan back then and really hated the "newcomer" web forums. And it just got worse.

There's a lot of history lost from the Usenet era as well. I don't often come across comprehensive irc archives.

Until recently there was an art project called olduse.net that replayed usenet posts with a 30 year time delay. It worked over nntp so you accessed it with a newsreader.

I really enjoyed reading through old discussions at the speed they happened, but sadly they shut down recently :(

They released the source code though, perhaps one weekend I'll restart it!

From the first mention of "Return of the Jedi":

"I wish Lucas & Co. would get the thing going a little faster. I can't really imagine waiting until 1997 to see all nine parts of the Star Wars series."

They would be so horrified by what actually happened.

I don't know. The mainline franchise turned out to be kind of a disaster (the prequels less so than the sequels, surprisingly) but the ancillary content has been pretty good.

Oh from the title I was expecting the inverse -- the first time someone in popular media mentioned the internet in some way.

I still remember the first time I heard _modem sounds_ in a radio ad spot. I about fell out of my chair. Why would someone advertise that? Only like 0.0001% of the listenership would know what that sound means! Oh wait.... are there more people who'd recognize that now? Hmm, I guess that might be the case. Whoah. Some advertiser, whose job is to know these things, believes a commercially significant fraction of listeners would know that. WHOAH.

What is happening???

The idea that modems and computers were going mainstream, was a paradigm shift I think other folks must've experienced but we don't seem to talk much about. Anyone under about age 35 I figure has always known the internet as a popular thing, and I don't know if it's possible to convey how huge a transformation that was for us older folks who lived through it. Imagine a talkshow guest just casually mentioning their fursona like it's no big deal and the host just responds by talking about theirs like of course this is something everyone does. That's the level of shock and confusion.

But it's bigger than that. This wasn't just a hobby, I mean it was a hobby, but it's one that everyone involved understood would change the world if it went mainstream. Of course that would never happen...

The popular media covered home computers quite bit during the early years (late 70s), and dozens of books were published by TAB, McGraw Hill, etc, with BASIC program listings, etc.

I remember listening to WBAI late summer in 1977 and hearing Nat Broizman call in to some late night radio show and relayed the audio of his TRS-80 playing the theme from the "William Tell Overture" with radio signals induced into a nearby radio receiver. The following week, WBAI was actually broadcasting TRS-80 cassette software over the air!

This was the first exposure to a home computer I ever had. I was able to track down Nat via phone phreak connections and got to play with the TRS-80 soon after. I got myself a Commodore PET and then an Apple ][. The Phone Phreaks were quick to use computers to generate tones and to auto-dial.

Interesting, In what year did this happen? I wonder if it's related to the Eternal September.

Oh now that's a good question. I'm thinking 1994, because of which radio station I was listening to and I wasn't sick of them yet... Now I wish I had a written note of it.

That sounds about right. Similar time to when I was seeing TV shows talk about to to reach them on CompuServe, AOL, then just straight up WWW websites. I especially remember my dad saying, "Well, it's definitely happening now if we're getting .com domains on regular TV ads." (He was using ARPANET as a teenager before going on to Stanford for EE and Physics, so he'd been following it for a while, haha.)

Found the original URL for this from an old Slashdot post, here it is on the Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20011212191924/http://www.google... I remember reading this when it first happened, now it's twenty years later, ouch.

Yes - I also recall reading this in 2002 when Google took over the Deja News archive.

It’s odd to reflect that it’s been longer since I first read this nostalgic post… than the time it was actually looking back on.

I’m sure I could word that better, but hopefully it makes some sense.

Cant seem to browse these, rejected requests by google

Here's one I like to share with people since it feels so topical today. Mark Pitcavage asking Usenet in 1995 why Calvin and Hobbes had almost no black characters. 1995 was while Calvin was still being published.

https://groups.google.com/g/rec.arts.comics.strips/c/Y6VScu0...

IMVHO the main points of usenet does not count much in archival terms, yes archives, especially personal ones, might be useful but that's just a nice addition, the real "cultural" main points are IMO:

- being property of no one, so no one can act as a general censor, we are all peers, between our peers, like we are/should be in a real democracy as Citizens, there are rules, there are "private" parts (groups) etc but we are ultimately free;

- being decentralized, for similar reason, anyone can run a usenet server and many in the past have done that, again a guarantee of freedom;

- being "local" in the sense that local client can archive messages, is the main UI etc, so we can change server from a third party ones to another to ours own one and nothing change in most cases, we have our messages, we read others messages etc.

Those are the main technical points that still make usenet a good things too bad so many have forgotten.

The humans one are: mixed people, on a group is common found a guru of the group main topic and newbies talking each others, benefiting each others: the guru understand what happen in the non-hi-culture world and newcomers benefit from guru teaching. In every fields. These days we have HN for some topics, Reddit for some other but nothing like usenet, generic and effective/specific at the same times. On usenet we have killfiles, groups, scoring, so we do have "filter bubbles" but not by someone else: our OWN personal bubbles we can change, know and control as we wish and that's a very big difference: usenet give something MORE than today's "recommendation engines"/"aggregators" while remain fully personal and free and that's the most important humans points.

Having essentially lost that just because of eternal September and shiny new modern WebUI is really a shame, just like dropping gold because there is a bit of mud on it.

Did anyone care about the decentralization or the lack of censorship at the time? Seems more like a hindsight thing.

Can't really tell, but also emails where decentralized and designed in a way to be as open as possible to ensure interoperability, so is DNS etc. Essentially all "classic" networked things are born decentralized, even the most classic Xerox Star Office System, probably not to be anti-censorship but just to be flexible leaving anyone free to do whatever he/she want remaining fully able to interact with the rest of the world and for fault tolerance, both things we need today...

I want to feel the way I felt when I was about 13 years old and got my first modem, calling my first BBS with my Commodore 64 in the dead of night and seeing those colorful characters slowly scroll across the screen…

I'd be curious if someone trained a large language model (i.e. BERT, GPT) on the Usenet data, and compare with those trained on modern datasets (i.e. reddit).

The last link on the page (Nov 1989 First post from Berlin after the wall came down) seems to be wrong, it links to the page itself

A typo in the HTML syntax. View Source is your friend. http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=85%40nixbln.UUCP

Hilarious how they go to the trouble of obfuscating email addresses, but phone numbers and postal addresses are right there.

I got a lot of pleasure from Usenet / Nutnews back in the day.

I sometimes wonder if I should try to find an NNTP feed and a version of rn (1) and check it out again.

The Commodore 64 example is quite interesting. The reply is from Brad Templeton from his U Waterloo account.

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