Re: Hello again ...

Thomas Truscott (trt@rti.rti.org)
Tue, 25 Sep 90 09:57:27 -0400

Other topics:
The "technological matrix" that made Usenet possible:
Unix, uucp, cheap modems, a sufficient "market"
for Unix that people would pay phone bills, etc.

The first newsgroups
"fa" groups
"net." groups
The mistake of net.general
The very first news groups were "NET." and local groups
such as "dept". Later Horton et al. oversaw the lower-casing of NET.
Only when ucbvax joined the net did "fa" appear.
Indeed I was unaware of the Arpanet mailing lists
such as human-nets until ucbvax enlightened us.
But in retrospect the events all seem inevitable.
I think "FidoNet" was invented in ignorance of Usenet
(and vice-versa, I'm not sure of the dates for FidoNet).

Imminent death of net predicted
A common thread here is "junk news". Such as the woman in New Jersey
posting "Dinette Set for Sale" that went everywhere (e.g. to Australia).

June 90/"Internet Porno Ring"/Houston Chronicle

Oh my! Do you have a copy of this?

smileys
I sure would like to know who invented this.
Any idea how old :-) is? Someone posted an article on
it in 1981 or maybe 1982, I think.
Did it predate that? I don't remember.
Maybe it is worth dredging through our old news tapes.
Tom Truscott

This page last updated on: Jul 1 09:16