Wow!!! 112,244 old posts!!!

[a425couple]

Wow!!! 112,244 old posts from the Heinlein group!!!

I had been using a 2007 computer updated to 2010 hard drive,
posting using Outlook Express. Well, recently it went black.
At the computer fix up place, he put power to it and "SNAP!!!"
& nasty burned electrical smell.
Got a new computer. The old "Outlook Express" could not
be loaded on new computer "not compatible with operating system".
So, I'm having to fight, and learn, and current things do not
seem to like newsgroups.
The "newsguy" program was not very good for me.
It used to be simple, find an interesting quote, citation or whatever,
capture it, paste it on "new post" and all ready.

Someone elsewhere suggested I try "Mozilla Thunderbird".

So, I'm working on trying & learning it.
I went to open alt.fan.heinlein, and had the option of picking how
many of the 112,000 old posts I wanted to download.
For whatever reason, right or wrong, good or bad, I picked
"give me all of them!" So now I can always snoop back to the
good old days when the Heinlein group (and many newsgroups)
were quite active.

[Lynn McGuire]

I use Thunderbird for both email and usenet. It seems very much like
Outlook Express to me which I used to love on Windows XP.

I limit myself to 10,000 posts because TB gets slow after a while. I
also use Ray Banana's most excellent Eternal September for my usenet server.
http://www.eternal-september.org/

Lynn

[David Johnston]

Probably not. I expect what you'll find is headers but no body.

[Bice]

Depends on the newsserver, I think.

A year or so ago most of the newsgroups I frequented dried up, so I
went looking for new ones. rec.arts.sf-written looked interesting, so
I subscribed. Free Agent told me there were 65,535 unread messages.
Those messages, dating all the way back to 2010, are still available
to download using the news.eternal-september.org server.

If I have time after reading the day's current posts, I go back and
read some of the backlog. So far I've only encountered a couple posts
from the last 7 years that eternal-september couldn't serve up.

And it turns out that 65,535 number is just the maxium number that
Free Again can display on its Groups pane. For r.a.sf-w that number
is still sitting at 65,535. I also subscribed to
rec.arts.movies.current-films, and while it also started out at 65,535
messages, after a few months of reading the backlog it finally started
dropping. I'm currently sitting at 63,806 unread messages.

It looks like at some point around Halloween of 2010 eternal-september
just said "Screw it, traffic on USENET has dropped enough and storage
is cheap enough - let's just keep everything from now on."

-- Bob, r.a.sf-w lurker

[Ted Nolan <tednolan>]

In article <591cb806.72805448@localhost>,

65,535 is a very magic number to computer scientists. It is 2 to the 16th
power -1 and indicates that the max number of posts is probably stored
in a 16 bit unsigned variable.
--
------
columbiaclosings.com
What's not in Columbia anymore..

[Jay E. Morris]

On 5/17/2017 04:02 PM, Bice wrote:
> A year or so ago most of the newsgroups I frequented dried up, so I
> went looking for new ones. rec.arts.sf-written looked interesting, so
> I subscribed. Free Agent told me there were 65,535 unread messages.
> Those messages, dating all the way back to 2010, are still available
> to download using the news.eternal-september.org server.
>
> If I have time after reading the day's current posts, I go back and
> read some of the backlog. So far I've only encountered a couple posts
> from the last 7 years that eternal-september couldn't serve up.
>
> And it turns out that 65,535 number is just the maxium number that
> Free Again can display on its Groups pane. For r.a.sf-w that number
> is still sitting at 65,535. I also subscribed to
> rec.arts.movies.current-films, and while it also started out at 65,535
> messages, after a few months of reading the backlog it finally started
> dropping. I'm currently sitting at 63,806 unread messages.
>
> It looks like at some point around Halloween of 2010 eternal-september
> just said "Screw it, traffic on USENET has dropped enough and storage
> is cheap enough - let's just keep everything from now on."
>
>

I'm showing 254,146 available on Eternal September for r.a.s.w. You
might be a while.

[Gutless Umbrella Carrying Sissy]

"Jay E. Morris" <mor...@epsilon3.com> wrote in
news:ofihqn$f52$1...@dont-email.me:

I show 1.1 million on Forte's server. I fully expect they are full
messages, too, not just headers. But then, it's not a free service.

--
Terry Austin

Vacation photos from Iceland:
https://plus.google.com/u/0/collection/QaXQkB

"Terry Austin: like the polio vaccine, only with more asshole."
-- David Bilek

Jesus forgives sinners, not criminals.

[Greg Goss]

a425couple <a425c...@hotmail.com> wrote:

>So, I'm having to fight, and learn, and current things do not
>seem to like newsgroups.
>The "newsguy" program was not very good for me.
>It used to be simple, find an interesting quote, citation or whatever,
>capture it, paste it on "new post" and all ready.
>
>Someone elsewhere suggested I try "Mozilla Thunderbird".

I was an early adopter of Agent (something like version 0.18 if I
recall correctly). I stopped updating it at a late version of 1.x
because I didn't want to learn new ways of doing things, and I think
things changed in 2 and higher.

But I'm still using 1.x and it continues to work in 64 bit windows.
--
We are geeks. Resistance is voltage over current.

[MajorOz]

Never understood all the fussing, when google groups will do it just fine.

Nor have I figured out why gg users are sneered at.

Isn't simplicity the goal ?

[Bice]

On 17 May 2017 21:12:44 GMT, t...@loft.tnolan.com (Ted Nolan

<tednolan>) wrote:

>In article <591cb806.72805448@localhost>,
>Bice <eichlerS...@comcastsucksbecausetheydontsupportuse.net> wrote:
>>
>>And it turns out that 65,535 number is just the maxium number that

>>Free Agent can display on its Groups pane.

>
>65,535 is a very magic number to computer scientists. It is 2 to the 16th
>power -1 and indicates that the max number of posts is probably stored
>in a 16 bit unsigned variable.

Yeah, I've been programming since the early 80s, so I figured it was
some maximum binary number. I could have done the old 2, 4, 8, 16,
32, 64, etc, etc and figured it out, but I'm way too lazy.

-- Bob

[Bice]

I've been downloading the "backlog" about a hundred posts at a time,
saving them to a text file and emailing it to myself at work and
reading through it whenver things get slow.

I've been at it for a little over a year, and at the average rate of
100 posts a day I've managed to read from late October of 2010 to
early January of 2011. I don't know how you folks managed to read the
entire newsgroup each day back when the volume was that high.

-- Bob

[Lynn McGuire]

On 5/17/2017 4:12 PM, Ted Nolan <tednolan> wrote:
...

> 65,535 is a very magic number to computer scientists. It is 2 to the 16th
> power -1 and indicates that the max number of posts is probably stored
> in a 16 bit unsigned variable.

I don't miss the 16 bit days. I do miss the 36 bit days (UNIVAC 1108).

Lynn

[Ted Nolan <tednolan>]

In article <ofl41l$ec4$1...@dont-email.me>,

Worked a little on the BBN C/70 for a while: 10-bit bytes!

[Lynn McGuire]

On 5/18/2017 4:42 PM, Ted Nolan <tednolan> wrote:
> In article <ofl41l$ec4$1...@dont-email.me>,
> Lynn McGuire <lynnmc...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> On 5/17/2017 4:12 PM, Ted Nolan <tednolan> wrote:
>> ...
>>> 65,535 is a very magic number to computer scientists. It is 2 to the 16th
>>> power -1 and indicates that the max number of posts is probably stored
>>> in a 16 bit unsigned variable.
>>
>> I don't miss the 16 bit days. I do miss the 36 bit days (UNIVAC 1108).
>>
>> Lynn
>>
>
> Worked a little on the BBN C/70 for a while: 10-bit bytes!

The UNIVAC 1108 and Cyber 6600/7600 computers were six bit bytes. Who
needs lower case (lower case uses the 7th bit) ?

Lynn

[Dimensional Traveler]

We didn't. (At least most of us didn't.) We participated in the
threads that interested us.


--
"That's my secret, Captain: I'm always angry."

[a425couple]

Well, so far it works.
From 2003 in the Heinlein group, somebody posted a series of F-16
fighter plane jokes. It was a true and valid body. I just posted
them over into rec.aviation.military (which, like many groups,
is going quite quiet.)

[a425couple]

On 5/17/2017 1:03 PM, Lynn McGuire wrote:
> On 5/17/2017 12:46 PM, a425couple wrote:
>> Wow!!! 112,244 old posts from the Heinlein group!!!
>>
>> I had been using a 2007 computer updated to 2010 hard drive,
>> posting using Outlook Express. Well, recently it went black.
>> At the computer fix up place, he put power to it and "SNAP!!!"
>> & nasty burned electrical smell.
>> Got a new computer. The old "Outlook Express" could not
>> be loaded on new computer "not compatible with operating system".
>> So, I'm having to fight, and learn, and current things do not
>> seem to like newsgroups.
>> The "newsguy" program was not very good for me.
>> It used to be simple, find an interesting quote, citation or whatever,
>> capture it, paste it on "new post" and all ready.
>>
>> Someone elsewhere suggested I try "Mozilla Thunderbird".
>>
>> So, I'm working on trying & learning it.
>> I went to open alt.fan.heinlein, and had the option of picking how
>> many of the 112,000 old posts I wanted to download.
>> For whatever reason, right or wrong, good or bad, I picked
>> "give me all of them!" So now I can always snoop back to the
>> good old days when the Heinlein group (and many newsgroups)
>> were quite active.
>
> I use Thunderbird for both email and usenet. It seems very much like
> Outlook Express to me which I used to love on Windows XP.

Thank you for the reassurance (that I made at least a reasonable pick!)

> I limit myself to 10,000 posts because TB gets slow after a while.

That would have probably been a wiser decision.
One group that has pictures, I probably downloaded way too many.
Might need to figure a way to dump that. ??

For whatever reason, I only went back 500 posts in this group.
Barely a week!
So, if anyone was in the middle of a conversation with me, OPPS!!
Going to have to start again!

>I also use Ray Banana's most excellent Eternal September for my usenet
> server.
> http://www.eternal-september.org/
> Lynn

I will try to keep that in mind.

[Greg Goss]

eichlerS...@comcastsucksbecausetheydontsupportuse.net (Bice)
wrote:

>On 17 May 2017 21:12:44 GMT, t...@loft.tnolan.com (Ted Nolan

>>65,535 is a very magic number to computer scientists. It is 2 to the 16th
>>power -1 and indicates that the max number of posts is probably stored
>>in a 16 bit unsigned variable.
>
>Yeah, I've been programming since the early 80s, so I figured it was
>some maximum binary number. I could have done the old 2, 4, 8, 16,
>32, 64, etc, etc and figured it out, but I'm way too lazy.

If you were programming for microcomputers in the early eighties, that
magic number should have been very familiar as the address space of
the eight bit computers. Commodore 64, Apple ][, CP/M-80, etc.

[Cryptoengineer]

Greg Goss <go...@gossg.org> wrote in
news:eoci61...@mid.individual.net:

On my newshost (giganews.com), the quoted post is number
2,172,740

All after 960,000 (in 2003) are available.

pt

[Bice]

(Sorry for the delayed response - I was away for the weekend and I'm
just now getting caught up on posts)

I was definitely a C64 guy back in the 80s. I owned one at home and
my high school used C64s for its programming classes.

I probably wouldn't have known a lot about binary numbers back then
though, as pretty much all the programming I did was in Basic. One of
my favorite high school memories is of the computing teacher giving an
assignment to write some simple accounting software, and I wrote a
video game instead. He liked the game so he gave me an A anyway.

It just occurred to me that 65,535 might be the "bytes free" number
that the C64 showed when it first booted up...no, according to some
Google image searching, it was 38,911 bytes free. Guess the rest of
it went to the operating system or something.

-- Bob

[Greg Goss]

eichlerS...@comcastsucksbecausetheydontsupportuse.net (Bice)
wrote:

I had a handler program that would intercept memory requests from
Basic, and switch the rom or video in or out to access higher memory.
I don't remember a lot from that far back, but I think it rebooted up
with something like 60K free.

[David DeLaney]

On 2017-05-21, Greg Goss <go...@gossg.org> wrote:
> eichlerS...@comcastsucksbecausetheydontsupportuse.net (Bice)
> wrote:

[65,535]

>>Yeah, I've been programming since the early 80s, so I figured it was
>>some maximum binary number. I could have done the old 2, 4, 8, 16,
>>32, 64, etc, etc and figured it out, but I'm way too lazy.
>
> If you were programming for microcomputers in the early eighties, that
> magic number should have been very familiar as the address space of
> the eight bit computers. Commodore 64, Apple ][, CP/M-80, etc.

I'm just surprised Bice didn't have them memorized up to, say, 2^28 or so at
a young age.

Dave, obSF: what ARE they teaching them in the schools these days?
--
\/David DeLaney posting thru EarthLink - "It's not the pot that grows the flower
It's not the clock that slows the hour The definition's plain for anyone to see
Love is all it takes to make a family" - R&P. VISUALIZE HAPPYNET VRbeable<BLINK>
gatekeeper.vic.com/~dbd - net.legends FAQ & Magic / I WUV you in all CAPS! --K.