Date: Wed, 10 Oct 90 17:49:45 pdt
From: bjones@UCSD.EDU (Bruce Jones)
(BT) Chain letters over the net.
This actually happened very early on. I got a chain letter in early
1983, even before I had Usenet access, but only UUCP mail access.
(BT) net.women.only experiment
A sidelight on this: I distinctly remember some of the argument over
this (very late 1983, or very very early 1984, just before I left
CCI), and one event that sticks out in my mind very well was Laura
Creighton's contribution. She was adamantly opposed to n.w.o's
creation, and went to some effort to describe why it was bad. One of
n.w.o's supporters wrote her private mail which blasted Laura for her
position, ending with the supposition that, clearly, Laura was a
pseudonym, and "Laura" was evidently male, since no female would
oppose such a group. Laura posted relevant parts of that mail in
net.flame under the Subject: "I found out what net.women.only is for!"
Laura seems to have kind of disappeared from the net -- last time I
saw anything at all from her must have been 1986, and she hadn't been
especially active for a year prior to that. I have heard a rumor,
though, that she's still around, as well as mail-accessible at
hoptoad. She's one of the net.personalities that ought to be
remembered.
(BT) RN & Kill files (Wall)
Others have noted that RN's arrival was load-driven. It might be
worth observing that a couple of other newsreading interfaces since
then have arrived on similar motivations, e.g., GNUS. The format in
which GNUS can present articles, especially with the thread code of
v3.13, makes it possible to do amazing things with getting to the
exact news you want to read. I understand that NN is good at this,
too, as well as trn.
(BT) The problems with the old releases of B news
(BT) Line Eater Bug
This was much earlier. I can recall these problems while still at
CCI, before I joined Bell Labs. I have a very dim memory of someone
(Mark Horton? either him or Rick Adams) posting a pseudo-emergency
message to net.news with a patch to fix the line-eater. Early 1984, I
think.
(BT) Moderated newsgroups:
You must include mod.ber in here. mod.ber was a moderated group
created by/for Brian E Redman (of HDB [HoneyDanBer] UUCP) as a source
of weekly(?) summaries of Usenet traffic. The idea was, I think, that
the Usenet was getting _SO_ big (heehee) that we needed volunteers
summarizing things for us so we could just sort of keep track of the
highlights and subscribe to groups along the way when we noticed
interesting topic threads in mod.ber.
(BT) "biz" and "inet" hierarchies. "Gnu" hierarcy.
Bob Sutterfield, then of OSU CIS, came up with gnu.* while in the
shower one morning. He was sick of the volume he was getting in his
mailbox and decided he wanted it in a newsgroup where it belonged.
Early 1988, I think. I wish my outgoing mail files went back that far,
I'd check for sure...but 18 months is about all I can stomach keeping.
(BT) comp.sys.next violates voting rules
Ed Vielmetti issued the rmgroup a couple of days after issuing the
call for votes. He was getting HUNDREDS of "yes" votes and wanted to
stem the flow.
Oh, yeah, a memory I'd almost lost.
The backbone disappeared (went under without a ripple) in summer of
1988. I was particularly unhappy with this, believing that anarchy
would kill off things in a hurry. So I tried to restart a backbone
mailing list, called news-gurus. It had about 25 people in it. Ed
was on it, and he was really concerned about his c.s.n vote, posted
his desire to newgroup c.s.n right away to news-gurus. Argument
ensued that this was Bad, but Ed did it anyway. He was proved right
in the end. But it also spelled the beginning of the end of the new
mailing list. 25 was too large a group; flaming from people on it
with too much time on their hands and not enough experience managing
such stuff killed it. I shut it down over a weekend after only a
month's existence.
There is a person (I'll not say who) who is re-creating yet another
backbone mailing list now. It was started on the evidence of failing
anarchy of all the voting schemes and other trash.
(BT) AT&T complains about source code on Killer, shuts it off temporarily(?)
It was shut down once temporarily, came back up, then disappeared
entirely a few months later. I think the name change (killer ->
attctc) occurred when it came back up.
(BT) The forming of comp.society.women (proposed as comp.women) (Roberts)
Heh. I had the misfortune to have issued the newgroup message for
c.s.w.
I may never forgive myself for that.
This was the beginning of the end of the original backbone. The
backbone was flaming itself internally. Lots of heat, no light at
all, lots of strident posturing. Roberts finally offered c.s.w
(instead of comp.women or soc.women.something-or-other) as a
compromise, posted in news.groups. I wrote mail to the rest of the
backbone and said that if no one screamed at me by 5pm that night, I'd
newgroup it. No one did; I newgroup'd it around 7pm EDT.
I got hate mail in double digits for 6 weeks for that. I had the bad
taste to do this on a Friday night before leaving for San Francisco
Usenix 2 days later, so I didn't even know I had all that mail until
I'd been gone a week.
(BT) Alt.sex becomes #1 read USENET group
I don't know when this phenonemon occurred worldwide, but it's been
the case at my site since 2 weeks after it was created.
--karl
This page last updated on: Jul 1 09:16