[TUHS] Steve Bellovin recounts the history of USENET

George Michaelson ggm at algebras.org
Thu Nov 21 13:18:10 AEST 2019


there is a big US bias in the archives of USENET. All I could find
preserved (before Google deleted it) was my updates to the maps for
York.ac.uk. In collecting history, the US erased most of Europe and
Asia basically.  Our timelines are artificially compressed into the
modern era.

UCL gatewayed a lot of stuff into other news/forum spaces. So, our
view of the world was a disjoint set of UK news, USENET news, European
news, VMS news, BITNET lists. The world was an amazing place. Kuwait
camel breeders association operating online in teaching hospital email
lists in 1985

On Thu, Nov 21, 2019 at 11:14 AM Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:
>
> Yeah, I'd be super happy if he joined the list.  I enjoyed reading
> those, wished he had gone into more detail.
>
> On the Usenet topic, does anyone remember dejanews?  Searchable
> archive of all the posts to Usenet.  Google bought them and then,
> so far as I know, the searchable part went away.
>
> If someone knows how to search back to the beginnings of Usenet,
> my early tech life is all there, I'd love to be able to show my kids
> that.  Big arguing with Mash on comp.arch, following Guy Harris on
> comp.unix-wizards, etc.
>
> On Tue, Nov 19, 2019 at 09:01:39PM +0200, Arnold Robbins wrote:
> > The Early History of Usenet, Part I: The Technological Setting:
> > https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/blog/2019-11/2019-11-14a.html
> >
> > The Early History of Usenet, Part II: Hardware and Economics:
> > https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/blog/2019-11/2019-11-15.html
> >
> > The Early History of Usenet, Part III: File Format:
> > https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/blog/2019-11/2019-11-17.html
> >
> > Fun reading. Bellovin is another person we should try to get
> > to join this list.
> >
> > Enjoy,
> >
> > Arnold
>
> --
> ---
> Larry McVoy                  lm at mcvoy.com             http://www.mcvoy.com/lm


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