Archives?
kengm
thoughts that recently were planted in my mind by the orbital laser
system.
1. Usenet has existed for a long time.
2. By the nature of Usenet, any traffic on Usenet will have been
stored for a while on many large computer systems.
3. By the nature of systems administrators, anything stored for a
little while has a fighting chance of being stored forever, even if
that means on an unlabelled tape in an unmarked drawer.
4. The very first, or at least, some very old, Usenet traffic probably
still exists in machine-readable form somewhere in the world - very
likely on a reel of 9-track tape. Our world has gotten big enough
that we can store messages that cost the net hundreds if not thousands
of dollars, on servers cheap enough that we don't need to charge for
access.
5. The very first, or any very old, Usenet traffic would be of
interest to people today. Me, anyway.
6. I can be excused for not having been there to see it myself in the
day, because I was literally too young. I meet all the other criteria
for membership.
7. Such traffic would be valuable enough that it'd be worth
semi-organized efforts to find it and make it available. ["Now that
the living Outnumber the dead"]
8. If there is anyone still reachable with the power to mount such an
effort, an article in comp.society.folklore is probably the most
effective way to contact them. In alt.religion.kibology they'd only
make fun of me.
9. Maybe we could find out the answer to the age-old question of
whether the first article ever posted was a prediction of the death of
the Net, or just another MAKE.MONEY.FAST. Either way, I'm sure it had
a References: header.
------------------------------------------------------------------
Ke...@wwa.com
I was laying in bed, looking up at the stars
when it suddenly occurred to me: Where
the hell did my roof go?
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Eric Fischer
> 4. The very first, or at least, some very old, Usenet traffic probably
> still exists in machine-readable form somewhere in the world - very
> likely on a reel of 9-track tape.
It doesn't include the very earliest articles, but there is a year
worth of early Usenet (May, 1981 - May, 1982) archived at
http://communication.ucsd.edu/A-News/
eric
gr...@apple2.com
> 9. Maybe we could find out the answer to the age-old question of
> whether the first article ever posted was a prediction of the death of
> the Net, or just another MAKE.MONEY.FAST. Either way, I'm sure it had
> a References: header.
Are you sure? I thought the References header was added into the standard
later and not present since the inception of Usenet.
--
Nine quadrillion, nine hundred ninety-nine trillion, nine hundred ninety-nine
billion, nine hundred ninety-nine million, nine hundred ninety-nine thousand,
six hundred ninety-three bottles of beer. You take one down, pass it around,
nine quadrillion, nine hundred ninety-nine trillion, nine hundred ninety-nine
Lisa or Jeff
> 3. By the nature of systems administrators, anything stored for a
> little while has a fighting chance of being stored forever, even if
> that means on an unlabelled tape in an unmarked drawer.
Not really. On large systems, there are specific expiration dates.
Temporary files mean just that. It's possible files were backed up
on a cycle, and after several cycles tapes were re-used.
> 4. The very first, or at least, some very old, Usenet traffic probably
> still exists in machine-readable form somewhere in the world - very
> likely on a reel of 9-track tape. Our world has gotten big enough
> that we can store messages that cost the net hundreds if not thousands
> of dollars, on servers cheap enough that we don't need to charge for
> access.
It wasn't so cheap years ago, and it still isn't free today. In
addition to the physical cost of the reel, you need physical space
to put it, indexing, and a tape librarian. Now of course one single
tape is no problem to keep, but tapes add up.
Every so often they run out of tapes. When that happens, mgmt looks through
all the tape indexes to see what files are old and questions if they are
really needed. Many times files are marked permanent aren't really needed
forever and get deleted. I'm sure Usenet files would've been deleted,
esp if they were short of tapes.
Secondly, most places converted from 9-track tapes to cartridges.
Upon conversion, they looked at what was worth saving.
I got on Usenet about 1991. I was disappointed with the flaming and
trolling that went on even back then. For example, there was a cat
newsgroup, and half of the posts were, well, let's just say anti-cat.
Even on a local for-sale group declined into nasty name calling.
Frnakly, I think a view of old Usenet would be interesting for a little
bit, but quickly get boring. (And you probably find the same endless
arguments being hashed today back then, by the same people.)
Stephen Tell
>In article <FBD92...@midway.uchicago.edu>, ke...@wwa.com (kengm) wrote:
>
>> 9. Maybe we could find out the answer to the age-old question of
>> whether the first article ever posted was a prediction of the death of
>> the Net, or just another MAKE.MONEY.FAST. Either way, I'm sure it had
>> a References: header.
>Are you sure? I thought the References header was added into the standard
>later and not present since the inception of Usenet.
Indeed. In fact, header keywords of any kind were a later inovation - I
believe they came in with "B" news.
A few years ago I attended a meeting of a local
system-administrators' group, where some usenet pioneers were present and
discussed the early days. They passed out a copy of an "Invitation to a
General Access UNIX Network" to be implemented among version 6 and 7 systems.
The paragraph specifying the news file format in which articles were
transfered via UUCP:
"Although we can supply a news program, individual sites may prefer to adapt
their existing programs. This requires the abilitity to print an receive
articles in the news transfer format. The format used to transmit an article
between systems is given below. The first character of the file identifies
the format and will be used to simplify the inevitable changes in article
formats. The rest of the first line is a unique system-wide name, which
also identifies the originating node. The article name is used to prevent
the unlimited duplication of news articles that might otherwise occur. It
has a side benefit of simplifying the implementation of a "news on demand"
facility. Support for newsgroups (line 2) is required. All network
newsgroups will have the prefix "NET.". Support for contributor name (line
3) and contribution date (line 4) are recommended. A `deletion date' is not
supported; it is up to each node to delete ancient news. Line 5 is the
(alphabetic) article title."
After an example article, the document notes "Article and newsgroup names
are restricted to 14 or fewer characters."
I think I recall that someone said messages were limited to 512 bytes each
originaly. The cost estimates cited for nightly polling are "perhaps
$0.50/3 minutes, in which time uucp could transfer perhaps 3000 bytes bytes
of data (300 baud)."
There was attached to all this the first page of the man page for the
news(1) combined user interface and remote transfer agent dated 2/25/80.
I first encountered the 'net in 1985; by then the explosion in volume
was well under way.
--
--
Steve Tell | te...@cs.unc.edu | http://www.cs.unc.edu/~tell | KF4ZPF
Research Associate, Microelectronic Systems Laboratory
Computer Science Department, UNC@Chapel Hill. W:919-962-1845