It's always fun to realize that USENET is still out there humming along. I still remember the thrill of working on my ancient Delphi/Object Pascal projects, and posting questions... waiting a few hours and checking back for responses. There was no "instant gratification" in those days. (I wasn't really using IRC).
Opening this, and just searching "Delphi" I see that USENET never did get that "censorship" that I always assumed would eventually happen. The group names alone are truly unhinged. The Wild West is still.... wild!
Devilbunnies? Man, I haven't heard that name in a long long time. I used to be obsessed with reading all the stories in that universe. Never contributed anything though.
Imagine how odd it was to discover Usenet and find that someone else was already using your (offline) nickname for an entire universe of stuff. Early 90s.
It's mine here! I'll cede it to someone with the better online claim but only if you can prove you're not a Fudd in disguise.
Yup, in the 2005ish era, I found that I was downloading albums just because I could. Some I never even listened to! I got rid of my EasyNews subscription because it all seemed so silly to me.
I ran the tech side of the most popular independent ISP in Chicago (I guess they were mostly all independent back then) in the mid-late 1990s, and Usenet was the biggest nightmare we had to deal with. We were solid at it, too (Freenix-ranked, independently worked out the INN history cache, &c). Nothing we did had more fussy hardware associated with it.
The problem for us wasn't spammers; it was binaries. That's what killed Usenet.
My experience in the 1990s was that that was a very excellent way to get all the Usenet users in your userbase to switch to some other ISP, which in turn meant there was little reason to waste all the energy on Usenet if you were going to do that, which contributed to the centralization of Usenet, a system that did not make sense once centralized and that subsequently collapsed into a shitty P2P piracy network.
I had tried this site a year or two ago and found it unusable then, but it seems greatly improved now. I found posts as old as 1982, but recent coverage seems to stop around April 2022. Crucially, it supports full-text search on posts within a specific group - something which my own site https://newsgrouper.org cannot do. I find the user interface a little awkward, but it does now appear to be a really useful resource.
As I said, the user interface is awkward. You need to select the "Content" checkbox when searching for Posts. E.g. to search for "deadlock" within comp.lang.tcl, start with https://usenetarchives.com/index.php?s=deadlock%20ingroup:co...
then select "Content", unselect "Author" and "Subject" and click "Search".
Usenet archives have helped me tremendously. For example, I'm looking for info on an old (non-xenix) Unix for the apple Lisa and it gave me a name (and after a bit of digging, an address) of someone who was trusted with the remaining stock after the company that made it went under
Usenet was great in the late 90s and early 2000s. I posted a lot, and met some great people. I got a job doing tech review of books about WAP and WML from my posts in a group about the forerunner to mobile internet, and another job with a company making intranet software from some posts about ASP and vbscript. I've no idea where I'd go for that sort of forum today.
https://eternal-september.org/ last I checked there was still some activity on comp.misc after Slashdot pissed everyone off with their Beta a decade or so ago (same time Soylent News spun off as well). Definitely a few others with a handful of posters.
But yes, it's definitely small islands in a sea of spam or just dead groups.
It got ridiculous pretty quickly. The overhead to spam was so low as the protocol was designed to be low friction for posting. The system then took care of carrying the payload everywhere in a reasonable time. People fought back with filters and kill lists. But was not really enough.
Once the ISPs decided they did not want the added cost of running the servers usenet tanked pretty quick. Still alive here and there. Not even close to what it could have been or even was.
Surprised someone has not made a mastadon to usenet transfer protocol. It almost fits both projects goals.
I grew up with BBS access for a number of years, but no USENET access.
When I finally got access to USENET ... what a terrible place it was! SO MUCH SPAM.
And the few newsgroups not riddled with spam just had poor behavior. The nice thing about BBS conferences were they were all moderated. And the ones I was part of required you to use your real name (as verified by the BBS sysop). They took it seriously - if a sysop was found not to be compliant, his BBS was kicked out of the network for a period of time.
The only good thing about USENET was the tooling (news readers, etc). Otherwise, both early web forums and BBS's had it beat.
Little bit of both. From my own anecdata, most people I knew left usenet due to spam problems. Most of the people who did not were primarily the ones using it for binaries. And then yes, the binary angle started the trend where ISPs stopped offering it altogether, which even further reduced the likelihood that people would use it.
And then there were weirdos (sickos?) such as myself who hung on for an absurd amount of time and never once used it for binaries
I had to selectively stop carrying parts of USENET (I ran what was briefly a fairly important node globally) because of the volume of the binaries, and various sex and bestiality groups (probably still including some badly-scanned ASCII-rendered images!
What we have today is drastically, unquestionably better that what Usenet offered. The very fact that we're conversing in real time in a coherent thread where everyone sees the same messages is a basic task Usenet was not fit to provide.
In the early days Usenet propagation was slow and haphazard because the communication links available were very limited. Nowadays I can post a message on one Usenet server and it appears on other servers in a few seconds. So coherent real-time conversations are no problem.
On the other hand, with a long-running discussion, HN, Reddit, etc. still have no way to see what messages are new since you last looked at a thread, something which Usenet clients have always done and still do now.
Usenet must be a generational thing, because it was not widely available or used when I was in university. We were all concerned with if we were allowed to torrent content and how strict they were with enforcement. I recall friends on some campuses had very strict policies where two strikes could mean you had no internet service in the dormitory for the remainder of the year.
weird, it seemed like the search index didn't go back past 2003. And then I tried a few more searches and found some hits. So I guess the index is a little spotty?
But try a few search terms, you might find what you're looking for.
I spent over a decade posting so much to comp.lang.c. I've run into a few regulars there in my work since then. I suppose it's still ticking along but I haven't visited in almost 20 years.
Does anyone know if this is still the most comprehensive archive? I'd like to know if the owner found any of the missing 91-01 datasets or if they are available anywhere.
72 comments
Opening this, and just searching "Delphi" I see that USENET never did get that "censorship" that I always assumed would eventually happen. The group names alone are truly unhinged. The Wild West is still.... wild!
It's mine here! I'll cede it to someone with the better online claim but only if you can prove you're not a Fudd in disguise.
Even back then, though, it was always under attack by spammers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence_Canter_and_Martha_Sie...
The problem for us wasn't spammers; it was binaries. That's what killed Usenet.
(I loved Usenet, but also: good riddance.)
Which is why most of us stopped carrying the binary hierarchy[1] way, way before Usenet 'died'.
> it seems greatly improved
With 1990's style age "verification" to boot.
But yes, it's definitely small islands in a sea of spam or just dead groups.
It got ridiculous pretty quickly. The overhead to spam was so low as the protocol was designed to be low friction for posting. The system then took care of carrying the payload everywhere in a reasonable time. People fought back with filters and kill lists. But was not really enough.
Once the ISPs decided they did not want the added cost of running the servers usenet tanked pretty quick. Still alive here and there. Not even close to what it could have been or even was.
Surprised someone has not made a mastadon to usenet transfer protocol. It almost fits both projects goals.
I grew up with BBS access for a number of years, but no USENET access.
When I finally got access to USENET ... what a terrible place it was! SO MUCH SPAM.
And the few newsgroups not riddled with spam just had poor behavior. The nice thing about BBS conferences were they were all moderated. And the ones I was part of required you to use your real name (as verified by the BBS sysop). They took it seriously - if a sysop was found not to be compliant, his BBS was kicked out of the network for a period of time.
The only good thing about USENET was the tooling (news readers, etc). Otherwise, both early web forums and BBS's had it beat.
And then there were weirdos (sickos?) such as myself who hung on for an absurd amount of time and never once used it for binaries
On the other hand, with a long-running discussion, HN, Reddit, etc. still have no way to see what messages are new since you last looked at a thread, something which Usenet clients have always done and still do now.
But try a few search terms, you might find what you're looking for.