So I finally got my Usenet access set up on the XP box a little while ago (right after I posted my other stuff here tonight) and fired it up. I am using Outlook Express 6 for the time being (I know, I know, try not to laugh too hard; it is temporary until I get Thunderbird set up) and access through nntp.aioe.org. Anyhoo, started it right up in about a minute and what I saw brought a large smile to my face and almost brought a tear to my eye.....this is practically the same segment of the Internet I first accessed on an Apple IIE in Grade School around 1994. True, that was shortly after the begining of the much-lamented Eternal September but better late than never.

Looks like I have a lot of catching up to do. It appears I have almost fifteen years of lost time to make up for....... ;o)

By the way--AOL discontinued its Usenet service in 2005, so I have read. Unfortunately it looks like there's still a lot of work to be done before October 1, 1993 comes!!

But still, Usenet was something big when I was growing up. First experience I ever had with the Internet, at age nine, was on Usenet. It's basically a part of ME.

Yeah, Usenet is cool. ;o)

Yep. Grade school huh?

Eeek! Makes me feel old. When I was in high school, we were on plain old Apple ][ machines. No network, some people in town had modems and we would BBS, with the Internet a rumoured new development that I didn't get to experience until 1991!

Yes, USENET is great. Signal to noise is horrible in a lot of places, and it's currently under attack as ISP's are reconsidering it's bandwidth and storage requirements.

Nearly 4TB of chatter / binaries per day!

The very best Internet discussion used to happen there and on IRC. I suppose that's still true for some, particularly IRC, but it seems to me that's all fading fast.

These days, I rarely do USENET as most of the topics of interest have moved off onto lists and forums, like this one. IRC still sees a lot of use. There is nothing like it for quick coding sessions, where you've got a few people all at the ready to help work through stuff.

Outlook is actually a decent client! Thunderbird is far better though, IMHO. My favorite was the simple Netscape / Mozilla client.

At the peak of my USENET dealings, I ran it on an SGI Indy, Netscape client, 640Kbps DSL. That setup ruled.

At the beginning it was 9600bps, dialup to ISP, running Sun Solaris. Usenet client was text based, and ran on their servers!

After thinking about it, the one thing I miss from that environment is well threaded discussion!

This is good. Actually quite good, but just not threaded.

"Yep. Grade school huh?"

Yup--I was probably nine or ten at the time accessing it on an Apple IIE, with an acoustically-coupled modem running at (I believe) 9600 baud. This was around 1994 or so. Even back then, 9600 was considered by some to be increasingly slow, as dial-up modems were exceeding 14400 baud and higher!

Feels kinda' weird to talk about it in terms like that nowdays, in a world where speeds are almost ready to breach the multi-gigabyte-per-second mark (if they haven't already.) Jeez, there was a time when a 56600 baud modem was considered blindingly fast! ;o)

(This is what I am running right now, B.T.W. It seems that for the kind of stuff that I really use the Internet for nowdays--majority of it being merely transferring ASCII text like I am doing here--why spend almost $100 per month for a DSL box when my $7.95/month unlimited People's PC over my existing 56K modem works perfectly well?)

We didn't have IRC "back in the day"--in fact I had never heard of it until just a couple of years ago.

The library at Hearthwood only had two such boxes. Even as such, it seems they rarely were used to access the Internet and mostly stuck to the usual menial tasks--e.g. ProDOS, FrEdWriter, Oregon Trail, etc. It seemed when a curious student did approach the Internet on that system it always seemed to draw a crowd..............

Now Internet access has become so widespread throughout the Evergreen district that many students merely shrug it off as no really big deal. Sad that it has devolved to this point. Someone a number of years ago (likely predicting Eternal September) stated that the demise of the internet (as they/we knew it back then) has to happen sometime. The question was when? It's happened already.

At home we didn't get our first network-connected computer until 1997! During the first half of the 90's my next-door neighbours were the only ones on our whole block who even had a modem. So if I wanted to access the network when I wasn't at school (summer break) I would have to go over there where my friend R-- R-- and I would punch away for hours on it.

And then there were the remote "file cabinets"--just like having a second hard drive on your box. (In a time when the biggest hard drive you could find was maybe 300MB this was truly a gift from the Gods, it seemed) You'd write a file of some kind, save it on the remote server and either go on about your business or shut off your computer and go downstairs for PB&J and chocolate milk. And you'd come back to it later, perhaps on a different machine, and your file was still there, waiting for you! At ten years of age that was truly something remarkable, it seemed.

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Missing--when you do access Usenet nowdays what NNTP server do you use? I use nntp.aioe.org:119. (Also I sometimes access Micro$oft's own M$-centric NNTP server at news.microsoft.com when I need to look up something specific--that's not too often tho. ;o)

I use the one my ISP provides. That ISP is Spiretech, and they still offer commandline SSH Internet access on their Linux servers!

It's almost like being back at techbooks.com way back when!

They do dialup, BTW. Nice ISP, if you are looking to change up someday. Tell 'em ddingus sent you. I'm not currently running traffic through them, so I don't think the free month bit matters right now, but I like them to know I recommend them.

The best USENET access is via the pay services. Will run you about $5 - $10 / month.

Never did the remote file cabinet bit. Didn't trust it then. Looking back, it's kind of funny. I have a ton of stuff stashed in Google...

Is Spiretech a local service (like the old Pacifier and Teleport systems used to be--remember them? ;o) or is it a big national system?

Spiretech is a local company. I have visited them - they are in SW Portland in Goose Hollow right off the MAX stop. I was going to co-locate my server there, because they have very good rates for that. I built my server at home and started testing it off my DSL line...and found that it worked just find (if just a tad slow, but acceptable) from my DSL and that was October of 2005 and I haven't looked back.

I couldn't tell you what Spiretech is like as an ISP, but they did seem local and responsive.

I have used another local ISP, SpiritOne (and before them, Aracnet, which SpiritOne then purchased) for years, and I am fairly sure they still run a Usenet server. I don't read Usenet anymore (started in 1990) - just too much noise anymore and web forums have surpassed them in ease of use. I highly recommend SpiritOne.

Andrew

(And SpiritOne has a little BSD or Linux server you can ssh into as well.)

Andrew

Nice!

Spiretech is local. Their head Guru was the guy behind much of Teleport.com

Nice people. Just get to know them and they will treat you right.

I'll be using them again, once a few things gets sorted out here. Right now, sharing Comcast with a friend. It's fast --faster than the DSL, but I prefer supporting smaller local ISPs.

I thought that Spiretech had shut down its USENET server years ago. I remember getting an e-mail from the administrators saying that the low number of Spiretech users that used the USENET server, combined with the high storage requirements made it not worth their while to operate it.

I used to use USENET regularly from early 1994 to about 2001. Unfortunately, SPAMmers consistently hammered away at the USENET newsgroups throughout the 1990s, until unmoderated newsgroups ceased being useful due to the large number of off-topic robot postings. When I tried out the Spiretech USENET server, I found a number of newsgroups that sounded like they might be interesting. Unfortunately, I found that in many of these, all of the messages were SPAM.

Now Internet access has become so widespread throughout the Evergreen district that many students merely shrug it off as no really big deal. Sad that it has devolved to this point.
Actually, the thing I hear is the biggest complaint among the middle and high school kids these days is "whaaah, I wanna get on myspace!"
They could care less that there are much better uses of time, or that the message their friend on the other side of the school can wait until they get home (and they're using their OWN computer and time).

I've not used the client in a while. Looks to be quite a while! Man! Time flies it seems... After reading your post Alfredo, it's been years since I last tried USENET there.

The groups I used to frequent, all moved to decent web forums sometime around 2002-3. Remember that happening, but there was still international activity worth the hassle.

I quit posting sometime in 2004. (some searches to discover the magnitude of the brain fart!) This I did not remember, thinking it had only been a while.

Well, that recommendation sucks then, sorry Motozak! Good ISP though, just not for USENET. (and I don't think that's significant, all things considered, given the subscription services are a ready option --mostly that's for people wanting to snag the binaries though. If you are into that, I've been that route in the past and it rocks.)

Here is this too:

---

quote:

Dear mailandnews.com user,

We permanently shut down the mailandnews.com email service on May 15, 2008. We will not offer any support after May 15, 2008. We no longer provide any access to email addresses in the mailandnews.com domain. We no longer provide any access to emails previously stored at mailandnews.com.

If you would like to purchase the mailandnews.com project, please contact support@shanjemail.com

Thank you,
Mailandnews Admin Staff

---

Totally agreed on the MySpace, BTW.

If allowed, they will spend absolutely huge amounts of time on pictures, music and who likes who, yes no, maybe so, crap.

IMHO, this is why Murdock bought the thing. Being able to data mine those people, then brand them, then sell to them is gonna be worth something.

Re: MySpace users being datamined--
This is the version of _1984_ that I think is happening before our eyes. These young people don't care a whit about privacy, and they will give personal information to MySpace and other "Web 2.0" sites. They love to shoot photos and videos of themselves, and then post these to YouTube and the photo sharing sites without a thought as to who might be watching.

Back on topic: it is sad that USENET is vanishing. I tried readfreenews.net, which was one of the replacement news providers that Spiretech recommended. On the groups that I was subscribed to, there were no new posts since May. I am now trying aioe.org, but it seems that they do not carry rec.radio.broadcasting. That was a great newsgroup when it was under the care of Bill Pfeiffer. Unfortunately, things changed quite a bit after he died in a car accident sometime around 1998 or 1999.

It is sad.

USENET *Was* the internet. So many net-culture things happened there. Somebody better damn well keep the archives. There is some great history there.

You hop on, check out a few things not realizing quite what Internet really means, then you hit USENET and there was nothing like it! Connected in a big way. I was up all night the first time.

Reading is one thing, contributing is another. Many great lessons to be learned there. There is always somebody smarter, who knows more, can deliver a better insult, annoying, having an answer you can use, scary, etc...

As a parent, these social networking sites pose a bit of a problem. I don't mind them communicating over the net. Going forward, that's a good thing --same as we do here.

I would hope, as adults, they entertain the critical part of their brains in this way. Better to gather and talk, but close.

The downsides are many however!

-stalking

-rumors

-harassment

-surrender of privacy before they are old enough to really consider their choices

others...

Peer pressure runs extremely high too, and that same peer pressure works hard to cultivate a "below the sightline" (Stephen King term, meaning that level where kids can operate invisibly to adults) mentality, where it's cool to keep secrets and do stuff outside the parents privy.

Ugh...

I fought with this, finally blocked all of the stuff for a really long time. Took that time to educate the kids and keep their focus at home.

It largely worked, but not completely.

I've got it turned on now, but I also require they leave authentication tokens with me, in return, I won't go looking unless I let them know first.

Another thing that worked was the threat of a log. Again, though, not completely! They just moved the cool activities to other places.

It's a real battle for mindshare with these things. I don't envy parents going forward. I'm nearly done, with my kids having grown up somewhat pre 2.0 That cut the damage some.

And to be fair, it's not that we didn't do this stuff, of course we did! It was more limited though. We essentially had to gather somewhere, then do it, which kept it somewhat costly in terms of just pure logistics.

It's way easier now, and I think it drives a lot of the sense of entitlement I see kids with these days. By the time they get done bragging to all their friends, everybody expects everything right now, with no work attached.

Work is not cool.

School is not cool either.

Bad combination when reinforced in this way. I'm seeing lots of kids, just go do whatever because they think that's all there is.

I know that's a lot to put on some Internet traffic between kids, but I really think it's got a great impact we've yet to fully assess.

They love to shoot photos and videos of themselves, and then post these to YouTube and the photo sharing sites without a thought as to who might be watching.
And in a few years, they'll be wondering why they're getting nothing but rejection letters and postcards from colleges they've applied to, as well as being turned down for employment "everywhere," even the places where the job lines are "cash or charge," "paper or plastic," or "thank you for calling..."

Verizon just cut news.verizon.net access:
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In response to New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo's anti-child porn activities, three major ISP's have cut back or eliminated access to Usenet newsgroups.

When I looked at the binaries groups on Spiretech's news server, I found a few complete albums in MP3 format. I had an uneasy feeling about the legality of this material.

Yep. That's been running under the wire for a long time now. Top reason for subscription news service.