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bdowling

The rest of the lyrics make it clear that Weird Al knows exactly what he's talking about.

https://genius.com/Weird-al-yankovic-its-all-about-the-penti...

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In this particular song, His Weirdness offers a few timeless observations:

> Upgrade my system at least twice a day

> What kinda chip you got in there, a Dorito?

> You say you've had your desktop for over a week? > Throw that junk away, man, it's an antique!

yeah, the Usenet reference had to have been obscure even back then. and beta-testing OSes back then would been.. what? Windows Neptune and Copeland?

At the time, I had used/tried out the following OSes

  - BeOS 4.5 (including some beta versions)
  - BeOS 5 (including some beta versions)
  - Windows NT 4.0
  - OS2/Warp
  - Windows 95 (and it's service releases) (including beta versions)
  - Windows 98 (and it's service releases) (including beta versions)
  - PC-DOS
  - MS-DOS with DosShell
  - MS-DOS with Windows 3.11
  - Whatever old version of MacOS was on the school computers
  - Slackware

(might have some dates wrong)

I was also on mIRC and downloading from newsgroups regularly.

I think many ISP's would give you guides about using email/newsgroups back then as those services were considered required for an ISP. TUCOWS was super popular for this newfangled WinSOCK software (TUCOWS stands for The Ultimate Collection Of WinSOCK Software). I remember testing how fast the first consumer cable internet connections were by downloading from them.

You are right for most people that stuff was probably obscure.

I had been exposed to some of those, plus SunOS, Solaris, VMS, AmigaOS, QNX, Red Hat and Debian.

There was no such thing as a OS-monoculture.

At that time you'd have been mercilessly about mIRC. It's a client program, and you'd be on IRCnet, EFnet or QuakeNet, and the the last one would earn you endless disrespect from IRCnet veterans.

Today, Usenet is obscure. Late 90's was right around when Usenet was at its peak. ISPs back then advertised newsgroups as a feature: "we have a full newsfeed", that sort of thing. I worked at one that built a server with a whopping 9 gigabyte hard drive just for the NNTP feed! That was pretty cutting edge back in 1995.

Among the general MTV-watching audience of the 90’s, Usenet was very obscure.

I subscribed to newzbin we'll into the mid 2010's.

Eh; Debian has been around since '93. I'm sure there were dozens of non-mainstream OS's fighting for nerds' attention by 1999.

Weird Al has an engineering degree from Cal Poly

To be specific, he has an architecture degree from Cal Poly.

Maybe so, but I don't see anything in the lyrics that could not be taken from a friend who's "really good with computers".

At this point, however, I'm willing to give Al the benefit of the doubt. It certainly would be "in character" (for lack of a better term), for him to be knowledgeable enough to know the difference. But I have been surprised by others on this particular point in the past.

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