What is/was UseNet? Was that the precursor to php bulletin boards in way / the forums of the 90s - 2000s? Would the zoomer equivalent be discord for my generation?
There isn't a Zoomer equivalent, because the internet has been locked down since then, and anyone who attempts to offer an uncensored and uncensorable forum gets brigaded and maybe swatted, then cut off from the banking system.
But Usenet still exists.
(The pre-web antecedent of Discord would be IRC, latterly stuff like AOL chat rooms.)
And if you think it's weird to read conversations nearly as old as you, I'm a millennial and I've read Usenet conversations older than I.
> And if you think it's weird to read conversations nearly as old as you, I'm a millennial and I've read Usenet conversations older than I.
Now, rereading as I near 50, they are surreal. The conversations, and the moon itself, have not changed one bit. But myself and the world around me are unrecognisable to the 10 year old me still reading over my shoulder.
"this is more informative"
As someone who was on usenet before it was even called that, I can authoritatively say that it isn't. I can tell you that many of the claims here are false ... e.g., someone claimed that the name "usenet" came from news organizations in 1993/1994, but in fact the name was voted on at a 1982 USENIX conference (and I was present and voted).
In my day the answers Google would give you would be one and the same with Wikipedia pretty much.
Wikipedia has had its credibility attacked unfairly in my opinion, probably because it flies in the face of post truth.
Anyway, Wikipedia link is a perfectly appropriate response in my opinion but the snark is not.
I'm not hating on anyone, fundamentally dishonest person.
P.S. I helped develop the ARPANET and my name is mentioned in RFC 57.
P.P.S. My comment included the Wikipedia link ... so much for having something useful to add ... I did, you apparently don't. The whole idea that asking HN--a form of social media with all of its problems--is asking experts but reading Wikipedia (not a "conventional communication channel")--written/curated/edited by experts isn't is completely nuts.
Quite.
Wikipedia link is fine. Condescending snark is not.
But you seem to be just “that kind of person” so maybe you just don’t really know you’re doing it and in your quieter moments wonder why your friends talk over you all the time.
They expressed horror, and said something to the effect of “My god! I came to discuss cats!”.
Another user commented something along the lines of “You have mistaken this forum for a place to exchange information. It is not. It is a public toilet. Jump on in.”
The big difference between those two services and the web was that most participants used text-only software (in terminals) to access them. Actually an even bigger difference is that (like all the other services on the internet back then) net news and IRC were run by volunteers.
The average IQ on the internet back then was more than 130 (whereas of course today it is in the range of 102 to 105) -- and it was 98% or 99% men and much more libertarian than today. One thing that hasn't changed is that people back then tended to spent much more time on the internet (particularly, on the newsgroups, IRC, text-only MMORPGs) than is good for them.
It was always called the newsgroups or "net news": calling it Usenet was started by the news industry when they started explaining the internet to the world in 1993 and 1994 because obviously "net news" is a horrible name (in their minds) for any service or scene that they did not control.
More precisely, the newsgroups began on what is basically a "competitor" to the internet called Usenet, then migrated to the internet, so "Usenet news", i.e., that news-like service that started on Usenet, is not a terrible name for it, but "Usenet" by itself is kind of a bad name because it already meant something different, namely, this network (now probably long gone) that carried email and other services in addition to newsgroups.
This, along with several of your other claims, is a fabrication. I actually participated in the vote on the name at the 1982 USENIX conference.
The news industry had nothing to do with the name "usenet", which came into use in 1982 as a result of a vote by the participants (I was one) at a USENIX conference. The "use" part came from USENIX (the UNIX user's organization). It was decided that "usenet" would refer just to the newsgroups, and the network itself was called UUCPNET.
There is of course no measure of the IQ of users of usenet (or of the ARPANET, or of the internet, or of the web, which again are different things). One can suspect that it was above average because the nodes were mostly universities, but not everyone going to universities is above average in intelligence.
There is also of course no measure of their political leanings, but since these were universities shortly after the invasion of VietNam and its accompanying draft and fresh from the development of the civil rights, LGBT, women's rights, and environmental movements, they tended to be quite liberal, but of course there was a spectrum and some extreme outliers (Clayton Cramer comes to mind). The most memorable libertarian I recall was Laura Creighton who, notably, was not a man. I particularly remember her saying, without any irony, that "If I thought I didn't have free will I'd shoot myself". Ah, those were the days.
At the Internet Archive (and apparently from Kahle's own personal collection): <https://archive.org/details/matrixcomputernet00quar/page/n3/...>
I'd begun using Usenet at about the same time as the book was published, and can't personally attest to the information jibal's giving, but will vouch that their account is far more accurate than that to which they're responding.
In 1991 it was almost universally referred to as the Internet (capital I): I met only one person between then and now who called it ARPANET.
I concede my final 2 paragraphs contained errors (more at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44722631) and promise not to perpetuate those errors in the future.
I am very curious about the great switchover from Network Control Program (NCP) to TCP/IP on January 1, 1983. From the perspective of an ordinary user of the network with no interest in the low-level details of how the network worked, did anything change beyond maybe the appearance of the Path field in email headers?
E-mail, Telnet and FTP worked the same way before and after the switchover; did they not?
"In 1991 it was almost universally referred to as the Internet (capital I): I met only one person between then and now who called it ARPANET."
What "it"? Again, the ARPANET and the Internet are (were, since the ARPANET was decommissioned in 1990) different things.
The Internet is called that because it was formed from interconnected networks, one of which was the ARPANET. The ARPANET did not become the Internet in 1983, it simply adopted the protocols that would later be the basis of the entire Internet.
This isn't worth pursuing further.