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That's what parity data was for. There were even clients that would seek out all of the binaries that had enough parts for a full download and do all of the work for you.

That said, alt.binaries was a big reason that ISPs started dropping Usenet. The other being the ever decreasing signal to noise ratio as the entire system proved to be vulnerable to spam and trolls. Yet another example of why moderation is a necessary evil if you want to scale up a discussion group.

"GIANT FILE" == porn...

How many of us attempted to automate this process :-)

Isn't that what parchive[1] and/or RAR recovery volumes were for?

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parchive

The solution to that was a perl script called (I think) aub (Assemble USENET binaries). I remember back in the 90s, some friends and I in college would run that as a cron job to accumulate files over time. This was long enough ago that the version we ran was Perl 4.

This is interesting, i know that same script. I thought a buddy of mine out of Arlington TX wrote it around '96 or '97. I didn't know it existed outside of our autonomous vehicle systems lab. We used it to accumulate and categorize certain pictures.