Usenet Archive (1981 – 1991)

Boy, do I miss usenet news. It was a bright, shining star of the internet. Nothing comparable rose to replace it after Google killed it.

Here's a thread on the birth of Haskell in 1990.[1] Simon Peyton Jones was writing about GHC supporting parallelization, and the team lacking access to hardware that supports shared memory for testing:

  Good news: we are; we have a parallel implementation running on the
  GRIP multiprocessor, with absolute wall-clock speedup over the same
  programs running on a comparable uniprocessor (never to be taken 
  for granted!).  This has only recently sprung to life, so it will be
  a while before we can report proper results.

  Bad news: it only runs on GRIP at present, so that rather limits its
  distribution.  We have access to a Meiko transputer machine, but it
  is quite a lot harder to deal with a distributed memory architecture.  The
  compiler would port rather easily to a shared-memory multiprocessor,
  but we don't have access to one at present.

[1] https://usenet.trashworldnews.com/?thread=878480

Clicking through at random and found this post asking for support for protesters in "Tian-An-Men Square": https://usenet.trashworldnews.com/?thread=789653

Not sure what this is supposed to be, since it's a tiny fraction of the Usenet messages posted during that decade (less than 1%?). But it was nice at a quick glance to see some names I hadn't seen in 30 years.