Netnews: The Origin Story [pdf]

The 300TB a day at the modern news provider is staggering, and it's a shame it's 99+% piracy and porn.

"My" USENET was all newsgroups. rec.motorycles, comp.lang.lisp, etc.

We had a UUNET feed at the office, one of the large hubs for USENET, and a "smart router" (we could feed everything to UUNET, and they'd figure out how to move it from there). We had bang path email addresses as well. These still linger in old USENET archived post signatures.

I paired off a local fellow who paired off of UCLA for my home feed, and that was fed by a 2400 baud modem. When you're not just sitting there staring at the blinking cursor and the text crawl, 2400 is shockingly adequate for background text traffic, even though even back then, it was uncompressed. Over 80 notbook size pages of text in a half hour. You just don't "subscribe to everything".

Later I switched to a dial up Netcom shell account, running `nn` for news and `elm` for mail. I didn't have "internet" at home until 1998 when I finally got cable TV and a cable modem. (It was pretty exciting installing BSD from a single floppy that downloaded the rest from the internet!)

Ah, the halcyon days when signal was > noise on a public infrastructure.

While it has done so in a "total bytes transferred daily" metric manner, there are still active groups.

comp.misc has a reasonable amount of misc. computer related posts (and some amount of off-topic that one needs to tune their killfile to exclude)

comp.os.linux.misc has a fair amount of traffic at the moment (although the volume does vary over time).

You can get free access with an ES account (https://www.eternal-september.org/).