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Comment by jibal | Hacker News Reader

"calling it Usenet was started by the news industry"

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.

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I stand corrected. My mistake was assuming that the friend who introduced me to it in 1991 was representative: he called it net news and in 1993 or 1994 when people started calling it Usenet, he told me that no one in his experience called it that. The first people I observed to call it Usenet were mainstream news articles. When web sites owned by mainstream media started appearing, the phrase "net news" appeared on more than one of their mastheads / headers.

Wow!

As long as you're here ... can I have whatever sort of limit you have on me lifted, please?

I already did that. But can you please do a better job of sticking to the HN guidelines? I'm in awe of your involvement in computing history, but you've also posted quite a few comments that break the rules here, which is not cool.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Thank you. I will study those rules and work to be a better HN citizen. Thanks for giving me the opportunity, and for calling me out appropriately.

About my involvement: I was in the right place at the right time. I was hanging out in the UCLA Computer Club in 1968 at lunchtime when Steve Crocker (new head of the UCLA ARPANET project under Leonard Kleinrock) came by--he wanted to teach a class on "LISP and Theorem Proving" and wanted to know how to register it. We chatted and he told me about his recent MIT PhD Thesis on man/machine symbiosis to help programmers figure out other programmers' code (e.g., dead COBOL programmers), and I made a brash comment about being good at figuring out code, so he gave me a couple of challenges on the whiteboard that I just happened to be expert in, and he offered me a job with the Comp Sci Dept on the spot. I ended up sharing a cubicle wall with Jon Postel. My supervisor was Charley Kline, who was the first person to ever to a remote network login, to SRI--it famously crashed on the first attempt but they quickly found the bug and he logged in at 10:27pm. This was just a few weeks after the IMP arrived, which sat in a corner for a couple of weeks while engineering student Mike Wingfield built an interface card to connect the IMP to the Sigma-7 host. I was in the machine room when Mike came in with the board held high shouting "Eureka!"

Another bit of "just so happened" involvement in computing history: I was on X3J11, the C language standards committee (one of the very few members there on my own dime after someone on ByteCom challenged me to put up or shut up after complaining about some of the committee's decisions) and, due to alphabetical order, I was the first person to vote to standardize the language. IIRC, it passed unanimously except for an abstention from Doug Gwyn (famous for saying “Unix was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would also stop you from doing clever things”).

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